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| Medical teams from the Miller School of Medicine worked tirelessly under challenging conditions to provide care to thousands of Haitians wounded during the earthquake, opening the 240-bed University of Miami Hospital in Port-au-Prince nine days after the disaster. |
Six days after Haiti’s cataclysmic earthquake, 18-year-old Junior Clermond lay near death. Muscles in his crushed limbs were breaking down, poisoning his kidneys. Even if emergency dialysis reversed the damage, doctors doubted he’d walk again.
Yet, aided by a cane, Junior is back on his feet, his smile lighting up his scarred face as he visits nurses and University of Miami doctors at Jackson Memorial Hospital. “Thank you, thank you,’’ he says. “To God first, and then to those who saved my life.’’
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| Medical teams from the Miller School of Medicine worked tirelessly under challenging conditions to provide care to thousands of Haitians wounded during the earthquake, opening the 240-bed University of Miami Hospital in Port-au-Prince nine days after the disaster. |
Junior is one of about 4,000 critically injured earthquake survivors lucky enough to have made their way to the Port-au-Prince airport. That’s where, less than 20 hours after the 7.0 magnitude temblor, Barth Green, M.D., chair and professor of neurological surgery, arrived with the first outside medical team and began laying the foundation for the best-organized, best-staffed, and best-stocked post-disaster hospital in the devastated capital.
Green was already familiar with the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation. Sixteen years earlier, he and Arthur Fournier, M.D., professor of family medicine and associate dean for community health, founded Project Medishare to improve health care access in a country without a single trauma hospital.
Still, nothing prepared Green, Enrique Ginzburg, M.D., professor of surgery, Edgar Pierre, M.D., assistant professor of anesthesiology, Daniel Pust, M.D., surgical trauma fellow, and Leo Harris, a neurotrauma physician’s assistant, for the carnage they saw after landing in a donated corporate jet.
“It was like stepping into a horror movie,’’ Green said.
Carrying garbage bags stuffed with dressings, saline, IVs, and painkillers, the doctors were whisked to two nearby United Nations meeting tents. Inside, nearly 250 people, most with severe dehydration and severed limbs, extremity fractures or gaping wounds, moaned and screamed on flimsy cots.
Shaking off their shock, the doctors worked at a feverish pace. Kneeling at cot after cot, they inserted IVs, dressed wounds, dispensed painkillers, and set bones with whatever they could find—a stick, a table leg, a strip of cardboard. When they reached the last cot, they started anew, barely resting when reinforcements and more supplies arrived from Miami the next day.
The pace was just as frenzied at the Miami command center of the emerging Haiti Relief Task Force, a relentless group of Miller School leaders and staff who worked around the clock to move hundreds of medical volunteers and tons of supplies and equipment to a country in chaos.
Just eight days after Green’s arrival, the task force and the volunteers at the airport opened the University of Miami Hospital in Haiti a half mile from the UN compound. Housed in four large tents, the 240-bed hospital, with four ORs, adult and pediatric wards, and hundreds of volunteer doctors, nurses, and therapists from UM and beyond, remains an oasis of hope under the auspices of the UM Global Institute and Project Medishare.
Today, Junior Clermond, who was airlifted to Jackson four days before the hospital opened, remains effusive in his gratitude. He may not understand that Miller School volunteers are equally grateful. They feel privileged to have been able to help so many in such need.
“When the history of the Miller School is written, the chapter on our rapid response in Haiti will be among our finest hours,’’ Miller School Dean Pascal J. Goldschmidt, M.D., said. “This is why we become doctors.’’
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