The work of doctors and nurses in primative conditions at the University of Miami/Project Medishare field hospital in Port-au-Prince continues to amaze.
Doctors at the hospital, which is housed in tents next to an airport runway and lacks some basic medical equipment, reattached the ear of a college student who was doing missions work in Haiti when a truck carrying her group crashed into a mountainside last week.
Alysa Askew, a 20-year-old junior at Hannibal-LaGrange College in Missouri, credits the Miami doctors with saving lives after the group’s vehicle lost its brakes and their driver was forced to choose between plunging off a cliff and slamming into the mountain.
“You would probably be reporting on funerals,” she told media from her bedside at Jackson Memorial, where she was flown after the operation to reattached her severed ear.
The Hannibal-LaGrange group flew to Port-au-Prince for an 8-day earthquake relief mission, and had just finished handing out tarps to displaced Haitians when they climbed aboard a turquoise pickup for a curvy trip back down a mountainside in the neighborhood of Titanyen.
Askew was riding atop the roof of the truck when the brakes failed and it began to pick up speed. She was carried the farthest from the site of impact when the truck struck the mountain at an estimated 50 miles an hour.
Many of the injured have been able to return home since being treated in the tent hospital.
“If anything good came from the earthquake, it is that this facility saved their lives,” Dr. Jonathan Jagid, a University of Miami assistant professor of clinical neurosurgery, told the Miami Herald.
The field hospital was set up in tents just hours after the January 12 earthquake that devastated Haiti, getting a head start on the country’s emergency care thanks to Miami’s proximity to Haiti and the already established infrastructure of Project Medishare, which was founded years ago in Haiti by UM Drs. Barth Green and Arthur Fournier.
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COMMENT:HAITIAN-TRUTH.ORG This article is interesting, so far as it goes. What actually happened is this. The truck ran out of control and scattered about 30 people all over the place. Injured were taken to The Mission of Hope Clinic, at Tetanyen. Only a week previously, 17 people were taken there after a truck accident on the main road in front of the clinic. The second accident saw a number of seriously injured treated at the MOH. One amputation was required. The rest of those, who needed additional treatment, were moved to the University of Miami Hospital at the international airport. |
THE Mission of Hope facility has the only sterile operating room in the area.
It also host and ongoing flow of orthopedic specialists from the Austin area of Texas. They also have a couple of cardiac specialists and some plastic surgeons donating time.
A very good operation in an area that really has nothing
I am an orthopaedic specialist practicing in berlin and found your post most interesting. I am looking forward to reading more from you in the near future.