April 15, 2012
It is midnight on Sunday, and our trip is winding down. We are leaving our guest house at 6 am tomorrow for the airport.
It has been a busy, intense trip. Yesterday we operated until about 1 am. It was around 2 by the time everyone was back at the guest house and all was done for the day. We had an ambitious schedule as well as equipment and other issues. We did 4 urology and 2 ENT cases in one room, and 5 cleft lip/palate and 2 ENT cases in the other room. They brought us dinner and we ate in the hallway between cases. It was an intense day, but all of the patients did well.
Today was another busy day with 6 urology cases in one room and 2 cleft lip patients and 3 hernia patients in the other. One of the cleft lip patients was so malnourished and frail that we were unable to get an IV placed after she was asleep and we had to cancel the surgery. It was quite stressful. Our plan is to teach the mother how to improve her feeding and take care of her next trip. It really highlights how complex the care of these patients is and how fragile they are. We had pizza for dinner.
There are a few differences in Port-au-Prince this trip. Many of the tents around the airport have been moved. I don’t think it was because they had housing but because they wanted to clean up the area. It appeared that there was a high ranking official from Mexico visiting Haiti when we arrived. The roads are in awful condition, mostly from the rain, not the earthquake. There is much confusion in Haiti about what the time zone really is. Some people think that Haiti is on daylight savings time, some think not, some think it changed when the US time zone changed. It seems so odd that no one knows!
We had a good trip, but we are all exhausted. I think we will all enjoy a snooze on the flights tomorrow!
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