Monday Update

Phone call from Jay:

Today Jay did 1-2 surgeries but spent most of the day doing administrative work. The day began when the team lost the use of their truck that was being used to transport patients to the off-site OR. Fortunately, they came across a truck unloading supplies that belonged to an organization working out of the DR called SCORE. They were able to borrow the truck to transport their patient and the team to the off-site surgery.

Jay's job today was getting transfer notes written on the seven patients that were transferred from the camp to the USNS Comfort. The Comfort can transport three patients per flight and do three flights a day. So the camp which is now at a census of 300-350 may grow by about 45 patients a week with the new transfer system, depending on how many ortho-critical patients they are willing to take from the camp. Then he spent the rest of the day doing xrays.

The surgical/medical relief folks are fairly transient in the area. Jay says that a team will come stay for 1-2 days, then move on to another site. Ours is the only team that has stayed at this camp for the entirity of the two weeks. There was a time during the day when the team realized that a general surgeon was booked in the off-site OR as well as our team-- who felt that they had some critical cases to complete before leaving (tomorrow is the last operative day). So, the general surgeon was actually fine with cancelling his cases which were much more intense than he felt were safe to do when he was leaving the next day as well (one was a goiter).

The relief team (which will later include one HMC anesthesiologist) is definitely arriving on Wednesday afternoon. Some reporters local to Hershey-Harrisburg will conduct some phone interviews with the team around 8am on Wednesday for articles to be published later. The team is hoping to arrange a bus trip to Port-au-Prince to take a look around on Wednesday morning. When they get back in the afternoon, they will orient the new team before leaving in the evening for the long drive to Santo Domingo. The team will spend the night there before all flying out to various destinations on Thursday morning. Matt Budge, Shane Johnson, and Jay will fly back to Norfolk, arriving around 4pm... and will then drive together back to Hershey, arriving late in the evening.

The system at the camp for hiring local help is very smart. There is only one person who is in charge of hiring and firing which means that the process has been slow; they can only get through hiring 4-5 people a day to fill the 30+ jobs available. However, the system does create a consistency in the hiring process-- and the hiring person is a Haitian who is familiar with the local living wage and the amount to be paid (as often first world folks come in willing to pay first-world wages that considerably hurt the local economy by throwing things off balance). But there is now laundry service as well as a field kitchen run by Haitian cooks. So there will now be two hot meals a day instead of one. Last night, they had a very finely ground cornmeal soup with chunks of anise bark floating in it-- thicker than soup, but not quite grits-- Jay said it was very tasty. Today for lunch they had rice and beans and plantains and a sardine soup (whole sardines floating in a red liquid). Jay was looking forward to seeing what dinner would be.

Good night.