Alison Smith is a medical student at Tulane University who is posting frequent reports from Haiti to the MTV Newsroom blog. Today she offers her final thoughts on her time at General Hospital and the importance of "mountains beyond mountains."
Saturday, January 23, 8:37 p.m.: We began to realize the great need that exists outside the hospital. There are so many communities that have been cut off from aid. If they do not receive aid soon, there will be more casualties. People out there are dying from injuries that we have the necessary means to treat now. Today I connected with a Haitian drummer, Daniel Brevil, who is a friend of a friend from the United States. His community, Carrefour Feuilles, located in Port-au-Prince, has not received any aid. He brought three people with him from his community to the General Hospital to receive medical care. He told me of a 17-year-old girl who could not walk and probably had a broken leg. I tried desperately to get an ambulance but there were none available.
So we had to be creative. I "borrowed" a stretcher from the hospital, recruited two guys and headed out in a "tap-tap" (a Haitian public bus). We then climbed up a huge mountain to find this girl. She was sitting on a mat and crying because she was in so much pain. Part of a school fell on her during the earthquake. The whole school collapsed, killing many of the children inside. We somehow carried her down the mountain and got a tap-tap back to the hospital. We got her into the hospital (and even got Sean Penn to help us carry the stretcher). She got an X-ray and she was found to have a convoluted femur fracture in her leg.
I had to plead to get her onto an ambulance to be sent to a Baptist Mission Hospital about an hour away, which has orthopedic surgeons and the right medical equipment. It just made me so sad and frustrated because this is a young girl who can lead a perfectly normal life with the proper medical treatment. There are so many more like her, way up in the mountains that cannot be reached. Amazing Haitian people like Daniel are working desperately to find the sickest in their communities but we need to reach out to them and provide help.
It just reminds me of a very well-known Haitian proverb: "Deye mon gen mon" or "mountains beyond mountains." We have gotten the hospital into some semblance of order: There is a system with functioning operating rooms, pre/post-op wards, an emergency room, a maternity ward, a pediatrics ward and a medicine ward. We have many surgeons from Mount Sinai and Boston Children's Hospital, as well as ICU specialists from Dartmouth. But we are missing very sick people who need urgent care. We have climbed one mountain over the last week only to realize that there are other mountains out there. This is the tragedy of Haiti.
Sunday, January 24, 10:10 p.m.: The group that I began this journey with, the Bicol Clinic Foundation, is preparing to depart tomorrow. Since no commercial jets are allowed to land in Haiti yet (I have heard that airline service might resume on Tuesday night), the only way out is through the Dominican Republic (via bus, which takes about 12 hours) or on a military plane, which will take people to either Orlando, Miami or New York — and you do not find out until you depart where you are going). I feel very torn, because there is still so much to do here. I need to return to home soon: I am physically and emotionally exhausted from all that I have seen and done. But I really feel that I need one more day.
The hospital situation is growing more under control, but people are developing infections, there are still people out there with acute injuries that have not been treated for over two weeks, and there are still opportunities to bring some relief to the suffering here. We are still feeling aftershocks. People, many local Haitians assembling themselves, are still searching in the rubble. I only saw a few dead bodies brought in today. I still have not found a place yet for Giovanni, the young boy whose parents were killed in the earthquake. We have been feeding and taking care of him, but there are so many more like him out there. I want to make sure he gets to a safe environment that will protect him and provide him with the opportunity to go to school. Giovanni told me that he did not go to school because his family could not afford it.
We are still bringing people down the mountain with the help of Daniel Brevil, a Haitian drummer whose house was destroyed during the earthquake. We cared for three children today with leg and arm fractures that Daniel rescued.
Many patients spent five or more hours in the sun and did not receive any X-rays because we only have one technician. We cannot send many patients to the USS Comfort because it is full. We are getting many trauma cases as well (like gunshot wounds and motorcycle accidents) that are overwhelming our already heavy patient load. There is some dispute as many Haitian doctors and nurses that were employed at the General Hospital are returning to find that foreigners are running their hospital. The Haitian people are very proud of their medical skills, and we are just taking complete control. If this is going to be sustainable, then we need to make an effort to let the Haitian people resume care with our assistance. I fear it is going to be a very long and difficult transition.
MTV News would like to thank Alison for her brave and amazing reports over the past week. Please click here to learn about what you can do to keep supporting the people of Haiti.
Tags Activism, Earthquake, Haiti, Medicine, Sean Penn
