After Haiti quake, hospitals struggle to treat injured
LES CAYES, Haiti — Earthquake victims with broken bones and open wounds filled a hospital courtyard in this rural coastal city Monday, desperate to evacuate for better medical care elsewhere in the country.
But the window was quickly closing as approaching Tropical Depression Grace threatened to drench the country — adding to the already difficult challenges for international rescue efforts after Saturday’s magnitude 7.2 earthquake leveled buildings and killed an estimated 1,300 people all along Haiti’s southwestern peninsula.
“We are at the mercy of God,” said Francesse Moril, 24, who lost her home in the earthquake. Moril sat under an open UNICEF tent at the bedside of her friend, Michaela Belcombe, 53, a mother of five and grandmother of three.
They were part of a chaotic scene unfolding outside Les Cayes’ hospitals as hundreds of others like them sought help. One private hospital with 64 beds was already running low on basic supplies, such as medical tape, painkillers and antibiotics. Many of the victims here did not want to be moved indoors as the ground in Haiti continues to convulse with aftershocks. Instead, they gathered in the courtyard.
Workers bandaged injuries on the ground. Others rolled out patients in recliner chairs and lifted them into waiting pickup trucks and SUVs to be taken to the airport. One mother whose face had been bludgeoned and bloodied by falling concrete was forced to choose which of her injured children to seek help for first.
At the government-run OFATMA Hospital, an awningcovered walkway has been converted into a patient ward. The doctors’ residence is now an operating room and a school bus is now an ambulance for those too injured to receive care here who must be transported to Port-au-Prince.
The hospital, its walls cracked from the earthquake, is one of three in a devastated city where doctors must quickly assess injuries and decide who should be flown out now and who can stay as Grace approaches and aftershocks continue.
Belcombe, one of the patients, said concrete blocks in her partially collapsed home fell on her. The home was already wiped out by Hurricane Matthew five years ago and she had not yet fully rebuilt the structure. Attached to an intravenous tube and with her left leg bandaged, she prayed for divine intervention to bring respite to Haiti’s string of misfortune.
“My leg hurts, my waist hurts,” Belcombe said. “And now bad weather is coming? Only God can save me.”
At the airport in Les Cayes, Richard Hervé Fourcand, a former Haitian senator who loaned his personal airplane to ferry the injured to Port-auPrince for medical help, said the hospitals were at capacity.
“We have a very, very bad situation right now,” he said. “The hospitals we have cannot do anything.”
Like others, Fourcand had flown into Les Cayes to help however he could. Fourcand said he had arranged about 25 rescue flights out of Les Cayes, mostly by persuading pilots who had brought search-and-rescue teams, international humanitarian workers and journalists to ferry back injured residents.