'Almost' Doesn't Count

So close, and yet so far. Today I was working with a friend’s organization doing a mobile clinic, and the doctor asked me to bandage up a kid’s leg. Lo and behold, this child had sliced open his leg quite nicely and needed stitches. I told the doctor what I thought and she asked if I was going to do the suturing. Silly question. I’ve taken to carrying around Brenden’s suture kit with me wherever we go. So I had the translator tell the little guy that I needed to give him some shots with medicine to take the pain away and that it was going to burn a little bit at first. I had a teeny tiny little needle, and it was pretty tough to get that into his skin to give him the lidocaine. But after four shots of that, he was all numbed up (and probably hating me). Let me just say, this little Haitian boy did not have skin at all like the banana and mango peels that I practiced on. In fact, his skin was so tough that I couldn’t get my needle through. I tried two different sizes and types of silk and got nothing. I asked the doctor if she wanted to try and she said, “Well if you can’t get it, I won’t be able to either.” So at least she had confidence in my skills. But I had to just bandage him up and hope he went to the hospital like we told him.

About three weeks ago, I got to accompany a patient on a med-evac flight to Philadelphia. It was a 13-year-old boy who was injured in November when he was climbing a tree and someone threw a rock at him. It hit him in the head and he fell out of the tree, landing on his face/stomach and breaking his back. That left him paralyzed from the waist down. He needed surgery to stabilize his spine, and they don’t have the capability of doing that anywhere in Haiti. He lives with his Grandma, and Grandma was going on the flights as well. The patient did very well and the flights were uneventful from a medical perspective. During the first flight (5 hours on a missionary plane built in 1943), Grandma leaned over and told me she needed to go to the bathroom. So I was walking her back because I didn’t want her to fall. There was an area behind the seats where the luggage was before the bathroom, and when we reached that area, she started to squat. I managed to say “NO!” enough times that she didn’t pee there and I got her to the bathroom. Unfortunately, before I could show her the toilet and put the lid up, she started peeing on the floor. Not just the floor, but the door, the shelf, and her foot as well. Thankfully, there was a roll of paper towels and lots of Lysol in the bathroom.

Once in Miami, Grandma and I went to do paperwork in customs while they transferred the patient to the air ambulance. It went really smoothly considering they didn’t have passports and I was trying to read Creole on their birth certificates. We were in the air before I realized that I should’ve had Grandma use the bathroom. All I could think was, “Dear Jesus, please don’t let her pee on this airplane…especially not while she’s practically sitting on top of me.” Well, the Lord was gracious. Grandma waited until we landed in Philly and then just peed right on the tarmac while the flight nurses freaked out behind me. “You can’t leave the hospital until you explain to her that she needs to use a bathroom!” “I know, I will. But you have to understand that she’s probably never seen a bathroom before.” “Well, she’ll get arrested for doing that here!” Luckily, the EMT driving the ambulance happened to have a step-grandfather who is Haitian and she called him and had him explain to Grandma how to use the bathroom.

We went to Shriner’s Hospital and I stayed for a little while waiting for my dad to pick me up. At one point (this was around midnight), the charge nurse told me I had a phone call. I was confused about why my dad didn’t just call my cell phone. But what I found on the other end of the line was a woman crying because she was so happy that the patient was finally in the States. Apparently she works for Sky Hope, an NGO in the States that does these flights, and she had been the one working to set up this flight for the past few months. So I had a 20 minute conversation with her about how it went and things like that. It was strange. Not that she called, just the fact that I was having a conversation with someone that I’ve never met and will probably never meet. It was one of those “surreal…but nice” moments. And then, since I was already in Philly, I got to spend a long weekend at home. The flight conveniently coincided with butchering weekend, which was wonderful. There are few things more beautiful than sitting down for lunch and seeing my entire family around me. And gut buckets. Just kidding. (Mostly). I told my Grandma that I wish I could be in two places at once. But I haven’t figured that out yet, so I’m back in Haiti, where I am hopefully succeeding in implementing the tips my family gave me for making my blog posts shorter…

Yesterday morning in between teaching our groundskeeper how to properly clean the bathrooms, I was sitting in my house in my mostly broken camping chair talking to my friend on chat. She’s been telling me for days that I need to blog, but I haven’t had anything to write about. The previous day involved me picking up barrels to burn our trash, getting a water truck to come to the house, singing obnoxiously loudly while I thought I was home alone and then the kitchen lady walked in, and then using our new staple gun to put screen over the faux transom on my balcony door. Not blogworthy at all, but I was trying to figure out how to make it so when Mark’s phone rang. He was nowhere to be found, so I answered it. It was the CNO from Medishare, and she said she had an American aid worker who came in the night before with malaria and dengue fever and needed to be med-evac’ed out, but he didn’t have med-evac insurance, so could we help figure that out? I told her I’d talk to Mark and call her back. Usually I get off those calls feeling really frustrated because I always have to say, “I don’t know, let me talk to Adam,” and I really need to be able to do this myself in a short amount of time. So Mark and I conferenced really quick and he started calling people to see if they knew of anyone and we were coming up short. Then I remembered crying Sky Hope lady. After a series of emails, she pulled through for me and was checking into flights. Mark and I decided we’d head over to Medishare and check the patient out ourselves.

The report I got from the doctor when we got there was ferocious (nurses, nursing students – ask me about it because it’s incredible and I’ve saved all my notes – making this guy better is my ICU dream job). After we were there for a little bit, the director for the patient’s organization discovered that he did have insurance after all, which was fantastic. That meant we could get an air ambulance to come right to PAP for him. And miraculously, they were going to be able to do it the same day, when usually no one can fly out of Port after dark. So all we ended up having to do was work out how to get us and our truck through security so we could take him right onto the tarmac and out to the jet. He was stable enough when we transported, considering he’d spent the past two days with nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and had low blood pressure, a cough, fluid building up in his one lung, and very low red blood cell, white blood cell, and platelet counts, among other things. They gave me a bag full of injections to take with us just in case, but thankfully he didn’t need any of them.

This evening we got an email from the patient’s director. He said the night went relatively well, considering, but the patient has gone downhill today. He had to be intubated this morning and his platelet counts continue to be very low. Acute respiratory distress syndrome was something the doctor briefly mentioned to me that she was concerned about, among other very serious complications. So please pray for this man, specifically for his lungs and his blood cells/platelets counts.

Occasionally I still struggle with my decision to leave EMM, especially considering my original return date is 13 days from now, and wonder about how the support shifts when someone goes from “missionary” to “humanitarian aid worker.” Sometimes I just think it’s interesting that the support shifts at all. But this past weekend I got encouragement from one of our volunteers. The rest of the group was going out for the evening, and I was staying home hoping to have the house to myself. Unfortunately, one particular volunteer decided he wanted a quiet evening as well. Eventually we got into the two standard questions: “So how do your parents feel about you being down here?” and “What are the Mennonites?” Somewhere amongst my ramblings of trying to distinguish Mennonites and Amish (it’s more difficult than you’d think to try and explain something that is so ordinary to you), he brought up evangelism. And then someone who will only say that he “tries to go to church sometimes” told me that he thinks I’m exactly where I need to be to share my faith with people.