The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
YNNH sends medical supplies to Puerto Rico
It was only 24 hours after Hurricane Maria moved off of Puerto Rico, leaving devastation in its wake, that Dr. Marietta Vazquez began spearheading a medical relief effort to help those in need in her native territory.
“As soon as the hurricane finished, I called my family to make sure that they were OK,” the Yale New Haven Hospital pediatric infectious disease specialist and Guilford resident recalls. “It took me a while to get a hold of them, but as soon as I heard from them, and I already knew from the little bit of news that I had seen that it was pretty devastating. I thought about the hospitals and my colleagues.”
Meanwhile, Dr. David de Angel was hearing from his family, friends and colleagues on the ground in Puerto Rico and the situation was dire at the hospitals.
“When the disaster hit I started getting calls … saying just how horrible all this is. ‘How unexpected, how we prepared for the worst, but it’s just the worst was unimaginable,’ ” said de Angel, a fellow of pediatric pulmonology at Yale.
“This included projectiles hitting the generators in hospitals,” he said. “Projectiles hitting windows and causing damage to entire wards within hospitals, evacuations in the middle of the hurricane and this happened just two weeks after (Hurricane) Irma. So the horror stories are many.”
It was these kinds of stories that propelled Vazquez, de Angel and a statewide team to undertake a grassroots humanitarian campaign to help the hospitals in Puerto Rico. As Vazquez was hearing about the magnitude of the damage, she was reaching out to colleagues and hospital administrators.
“I did what I thought was logical and reached out to the people around me,” Vazquez said.
The response from Yale New Haven Hospital, Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital and the Department of Pediatrics and Connecticut Children's Medical Center was swift.
“I think my first contact to Yale New Haven Hospital was a Friday or a Saturday, and by Tuesday the donations left Yale New Haven Hospital,” she recalls.
The first shipment, totaling 15,000 pounds left Newark International Airport on Friday, Sept. 22, two days after the storm hit the island. All these medical supplies were donated by Yale.
“I’m very persistent and I made the case of the fact that Puerto Rico was a
U.S. territory, that the patients that we care for, a large proportion of them are Puerto Rican. I work in the primary care center and easily 40 to 50 percent of the patients we care for are Hispanic, that many of the staff at Yale New Haven, of the trainees and the physicians were from Puerto Rico,” Vazquez explains.
“Plus, the fact that people have a great heart,” she adds. “It was amazing. I expected my hospital to help and the department, but I was really humbled by how quickly they did this. This is not something I did, this is something that an entire team did.”
In addition to Vazquez and de Angel, this team includes Lorraine Lee at the Yale’s Department of Pharmacy and Carlos Lourenco, director of Logistics & Materials at Yale-New Haven Health.
Under the leadership of Lourenco, warehouses servicing Bridgeport Hospital, Greenwich Hospital, Lawrence & Memorial Hospital and Yale New Haven Hospital were instrumental in collecting intravenous (IV) solutions and lines, gloves, masks, gowns, syringes, skin care materials, antibiotics, sutures, gauze and surgical kits.
All these were loaded onto pallets, bearing the words “Desde Yale para PUERTO RICO Con AMOR” or “From Yale to PUERTO RICO with LOVE.”
While Vazquez says that getting airplane transportation was “a difficult step,” with personal connections by a member of her team, United Airlines agreed to take 2,000 pounds of the first shipment in an airplane transporting relief workers.
After weighing one pallet and discovering it, all by itself, weighed over 2,000 pounds, Vazquez began to worry.
“I thought to myself, ‘Oh, my goodness,’ she remembers. “There were so many materials, so many supplies and I was very worried. I thought, ‘What am I going to do? After all this I’m only going to be able to take one small, minute part.’”
Some work behind the scenes and the entire 15,000 pounds were enroute to the airport headed to Puerto Rico exactly a week after Hurricane Maria. Another 30,000 pounds donated by hospitals from across the United States, is currently being collected.
While the ports were closed and streets were unpassable in Puerto Rico, Vazquez gives credit to de Angel for arranging the ground transportation of the shipment to its ultimate destination.
“The delivery, finding the network to deliver things from the airport straight to the hospitals, that’s the piece that I put together,” says de Angel. “That was critical.”
Vazque echoes this.
“When it arrived at the airport there was a truck from the University of Puerto Rico Medical Center waiting for it,” says Vazquez.
“Within hours it arrived to the pediatric hospital and how I found that it was there was that I started getting texts of joy,” Vazquez says. “People texting ‘God Bless You,’ ‘God Bless You, It’s here.’”
Each person involved has contributed their own expertise to the project and in the words of de Angel, this was “an incredible effort from a lot of people.
“What I helped do was connect the dots,” he says. “I wasn’t carrying boxes, you know. I was making calls, explaining situations and just trying to keep tabs on who’s asking for what and where things were most needed.”
Lourenco admits this was a huge undertaking, but that the rewards were well worth it.
“A lot of the staff of Puerto Rican decent, over the next few days, came up to me personally. ‘I want to thank you, I haven’t heard from my mom,’” he says.
“People really were sincerely grateful that somebody was doing something,” he added.