Merlin's Alex Cottin blogs from Haiti.
You're given lemons, you make lemonade right? So what happens when you find yourself in a makeshift field hospital and hundreds of patients are flocking in with all kinds of injuries, begging to be treated? Well, the past few days have taught me you do what you can, with what you’ve got. As our little wheelchair so ably demonstrates.
This afternoon, after hours of laborious work and many successful operations, a few of us decided to scrounge up whatever bubble wrap we could find and made a soccer ball out of it. This was a huge hit amongst the staff and the patients, particularly two little girls who had been operated on the day before – eight-year-old Dianne, whose right hand was badly crushed and four-year-old Kerry, who suffered a severe head wound after her mother collapsed on top of her. From the looks of them running around and kicking the ball fervently, you’d think they were the healthiest kids on the planet. And soon, they may just be.
Looking around our newly established field hospital in Delmas 33 (nicknamed Wimbledon, given it’s on a tennis court), as the surgical team was performing its last operation for the day, I was overwhelmed by how far we’ve come in such a short time. From a disused tennis court we’ve created a reception area for patients to sign in, a nursing station, a fully equipped, fully working surgical theatre, a post-op. area for patients to rest, a storage unit for our medical supplies, food and water and we’re in the process of building latrines and a kitchen.
I certainly won’t forget this weekend, nor will I ever look back at the past 10 days and think that any of it could have been done better. There is a ton of work still to do and sure there are moments of despair, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s an absolute honor to be here and to be working with such a great team who is appreciated by so many. We’ve had to “make it up as we go along” many times thus far, and I’m pretty sure we’ll continue to make do with whatever we’ve got to continue to push forward, to ultimately save more lives…but it’s precisely for those reasons that I love this job so much!
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