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Dear RN Volunteer,
Like ships passing in the night, we were extremely pleased this week to welcome back one delegation of RN volunteers from our Haiti relief project while dispatching another team for deployment.
"It's an emotional situation, I feel for [the Haitian] people [for] what they need and how they are right now," said Lansing, Mich. RN Ashley Forsberg. The two heroic groups were among the thousands of RNs who have volunteered to be a part of our vital relief mission, which includes a series of continual deployments with the Navy relief project. Tim Thomas, from Watsonville, Calif., called his two weeks aboard the ship, "a life-changing, extremely emotional experience." Here's part of his message:
Patricia Taylor, a Chicago OR nurse, reports she was "struck by the drive and incredible inner spirit of the Haitian patients we cared for. Despite the pain there is a fierce will to keep fighting against all odds, against so many years of hardship. Being an orthopedic OR nurse in Stroger Hospital, a large urban hospital in Chicago, helped. There was nothing I hadn't seen before. It was the quantity of very complicated surgeries. In Stroger we might have a couple of intramedullary rods cases a week, sometimes none. On the ship we had them back to back, four a day, 20 in the first week. These patients would have multiple fractures and would require multiple surgeries. "In the states when you performing emergency surgery you don't worry about preserving the clothes a person may be wearing. Here a woman may come in with literally only a shirt on her back. You have to prep very carefully and make sure that you don't separate her from her clothing or stain it when prepping with beta dine for surgery because that may very well be the only piece of clothing they have. "Patients who still have family stay on board with them because many of these patients require sometimes as many as six surgeries. The patient sleeps on the bottom bunk and the rest of the family sleep on the upper bunks. There are all these little family units scattered throughout the ship." Similar reports are coming back from the group that replaced them on the Comfort. "We met a little boy who is estimated to be about 8 years old," says ICU RN Marti Smith of Oakdale, Calif. "During the quake he suffered traumatic amputations of both his right forearm and his right leg above the knee as well as a severe degloving injury removing most of the tissue on the right side of his face. We have been unable to locate his parents. When he is happy he screams. He was happy to see us." These painful stories remind us of the ongoing tragedy and
the severity of the crisis for the people of Haiti. Our mission
continues, thanks to all of you who have volunteered to go and
encouraged family members and friends to contribute to the
volunteer relief effort. Also see addditional news stories at:
In Unity, Registered Nurse
Response Network Donations are welcome at: |
The two groups met briefly at the
U.S. Naval facility in Jacksonville, Fla., with one group, all
operating room RNs, returning from a two week assignment aboard
the Naval medical ship the USNS Comfort, while the next group,
which included ICU, med/surg, and pediatric RNs, were shipping
out.
"We did a huge amount of trauma
and more intense than I’m used to. There were many multi
trauma cases. When we first got there they were operating on 25
patients a day. That's something we would see once or twice a
year in my hospital. And even then we would never see a patient
with more than one or two fractures. Haitian earthquake victims
would have 6 or 7 crush injuries; their head, pelvis, arm, leg
– even from a high speed car wreck you don't see that, and
what normally is a 10 hour surgery we would do in 3 hours
because they had at least 2 or 3 surgeons and multiple nurses
working on one patient at a time with multiple surgeries going
on at once."