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During the past 3 weeks I have changed my future
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My day was filled with joy!

It started early with a request for an IV start for the woman who has been in labor since yesterday as she now needed Pitocin. All day yesterday my patients all had microdrip IV sets. Now when I needed one, do you think I could find it. After much searching, I finally located one. They must hide them to use for our surgery patients (who often need large volumes of IV fluid!).

• Jamie Fisher and Kristy Petersen stayed up all night with the laboring patient
• We (the Hyster Sisters) did 4 hysterectomies today
• once again, put 2 spinals in for Dr. Kennedy and then had him assume care while doing the surgery while I left to do other surgeries
• Jamie and Kristy’s patient delivered a baby boy at 9:10am. Kristy did the delivery and the episiotmy. The mother named her son “Jamie”

• have not turned on my anesthesia machine in 2 days, as the “H” oxygen tank slowly empties, no matter what I did. All my patients had spinals and did amazing well on room air
• the patients families all stay with the patients in the PACU and throughout their stay

• There is often a plate of food on the bed when we bring the patient to the PACU and they are fed almost immediately, yet the nurses won’t let them drink as long as they have an IV in!
• when we don’t have enough help to transfer the patient from the cart to the bed in the PACU, they just gather up other patient’s family members and make them help!
• I keep bending spinal needles trying to get through the tougest ligaments I have ever felt. I guess when you balance all your packages on your head for decades, your ligaments in your back get very tight
• we had a power outage in our windowless OR from 1:07-1:55pm during the most difficult hysterectomy. We had 4 people holding 6 flashlights, Dr. Hale wore a outdoor-type headlamp, and Dr. Brockman wore Mike Cerkas’ baseball cap that had a “lid light” on it.

• I have just worked with the most amazing team of people EVER!

Back again for my last post of the trip. We did another 15 cases today but had to deal with a couple of emergencies last night, so most of the crew is a little burned out tonight. We finished our last 2 cases by taking care of one our interpreters and one of our crew with minor surgeries…..treat your own last. We walked to the next village and saw how most of it was knocked down by the quake, fortunately, no one there died. Many people who still have houses are afraid to stay in them in case another quake comes, and are sleeping in tents in front of their houses. It’s not that the houses are unsound, the people are just freaked out that if another earthquake happens, next maybe they will get killed/hurt, instead of others which they all know. It has been a very productive week and a very fun group. I think most or all of us plan to come back to work here at Double Harvest again. Thank all of you at home for your support and help in making this possible. Tim Kennedy

The adventure continues…

Audrey, Kathy, Linda Bielefeldt and I have renamed ourselves the “Hyster Sisters”. We did 5 (or 6…I lose count) hysterectomies and 1 tubal ligation on a 36 year old with congestivew heart failure who was told that if she had another baby, she would probably die.

Surgery count for the day: 17

Some thoughts on the day:

• patients are so accepting, grateful, and stoic!
• quote from Dr. Brockman ” we’ve taken out more poundage of uterus in one and a half days than in a year in Green Bay”
• one of our ORs has air conditioning, but no functioning suction equipment(Laurie is using a bulb syringe to suction her patients), the other room has suction but no air conditioning (the temps are in the 90s). Oh well, you can’t have everything!
• we lost a needle on one case and found it AFTER the next case
• we had a gecko in the OR

• in the other OR they had set up for a leg amputation revision, but it was decided that the patient needed a transfusion (to be gotten from one of our nurses). So, they put a table cover over the set-up and preceeded to set up and do a hysterectomy on top of it so we weren’t wasting OR time!
• Julie Bieber Fisher is in charge of triaging patients-they line up outside the fence. But Jamie Fisher was stopped by people at the fence and started bringing patients problems to Julie. He had 2 boys with porblems with their “pee-pees”, a woman with a breast mass, another with a fibroid uterus. Julie finally told him “THAT’S ENOUGH” when he told her about the little old lady who showed him the mass on her breast.
• we did a hysterectomy on a patient that Julie lost yesterday-she just disappeared. Thank God she reappeared today!
• I have never done so many spinal anesthetics in a day
• people here all have high blood pressure
• After people get past the age of 40, they look much younger than their age (which is interesting considering their hardships)
• Mike Cerkas and Jamie Fisher continue to awe us with their cuisine! We had hors d’oeurves before dinner tonight that consisted of sandines in oil or tomato sauce, smoked almonds, salsa, and various crackers. After dinner they brought out the dessert tray that consisted of Reeses bars, Hershey bars, and Dove Chocolates-we are getting spoiled!

• Julie, Stacie, and other members of the the triage team were outside teaching the people waiting to be seen how to do the Macarena dancepeople in out OR were singing the Mickey Mouse song after removing a uterus that looked like Mickey. Only the words were “M-I-C,  K-E-Y, U-T-E-R-U-S” and the remaining verses were somewhat different from the original song.

• Just when we thought we could settle in for the night we were called downstairs for 2 pregnant women in labor and a 53 year old woman with a BP of 245/144 with a massive nosebleed who was brought in by 2 missionaries from the mountains 2 hours north. The fun never stops!
• Valerie (the PA that was sick and staying in our “apartment”) was medi-vaced out today on a private jet to Miami

Keep us and the Haitians in your prayers. Peace out

Kristi Sarosiek 

This is my first blog of all time, guess I’m technologically under developed. I’ve had a interesting trip with a large variety of cases/pathology ranging from penile cancer to a mesenteric cyst that literally was “as big as my head.” this is an excellent place to work and the crew has been great. Haiti is still devestated and dirt poor, but not a lot different visually in the post earthquake era in the places we’ve been than it was before. I plan on coming back sometime to work here as something is always happening. Right now, as I type one child is being delivered, another woman is in labor, and a “mountain” lady with a 2 unit nose bleed is getting a central line placed for access for fluids and antihypertensive meds. What a mix! One more day of fun to go.  To my wife….I’m not as much of a leaker as you thought! I love you!    Tim Kennedy 

Back to the March 4 blog…

My first case was a 36 year old for a hysterectomy who had very large fibroids, although she believed  she had been pregnant for 5 years. The case became much more exciting when the lights went out (windowless OR=total darkness!). I lit the surgical field with my laryngoscope handle. After that episode, we very quickly located flashlights, which we used throughout the day.

Some of the other interesting cases was what was thought to be large fibroid, but turned out to be a HUGE omental cyst. We also had a man with a hydrocele that contained 3000ml of fliud. It looked like he had a small child on his lap when they wheeled him in in the wheelchair-I’m thinking he’s a lot more comfortable now!

Also put a spinal in a 25 year old young man in the treatment room. After the spinal was in, Dr Kennedy then took over the patient’s care by having EMT monitor the BP with a conventional cuff and ordered ephedrine as needed. I wonder how that would fly at Aurora BayCare?

While we were at work in our room, Dr. Kennedy was excising half of a man’s penis under local anesthesia for cancer and Dr. Vogel was delivering a baby in a treatment room.

We finished our day with a tubal ligation on the patient that Dr. Vogel delivered earlier.

Total cases for the day: 16

Thoughts on the day:

• it was so nice to do pure anesthesia. No paperwork, no ridiculous hoops to jump through.
• we have to give the patients their body parts as they often bury it at home. The surgeons were saying it was pretty strange to make rounds at night and recognize their patients by the uterus sitting on the bed (sse picture below)!

• it only took about an hour for us to stop noticing the bugs flying around the OR
• I had the BEST surgery team in the world. Kathy Cerkas and Audrey Burmeister rocked my world. We were a well-oiled machine. All the surgeons and techs that rotated through our room were great to work with!
• Mike Cerkas and Jamie Fisher are awesome cooks. I don’t know what was my favorite…”Chef’s Surprise” (they said they didn’t even know what was in the course!) or “Jamie & Mike’s Excellent Adventure”! When they were not cooking, they were literally carrying the patients out of the rooms (the carts wouldn’t fit in the door as the mattress was a bed mattress-the cart mattress was stolen after the earthquake), mopping floors (along with the surgeons), or triaging patients (good job Jamie!).
• By the middle of the day it longer bothered us that we were still using the same mop water from the morning. By the end of the day it was worse than swamp water
• Julie Fisher “lost” a hysterectomy patient today-she has no idea where she is!
• They have really ingenious wheelchairs. There is even a place for a bedpan underneath!

• the patients come in the room wearing their (mud-caked) shoes and leave them at the door. I am photographing the shoes and plans to do a collage named “Shoes of Haiti”

• I could not have asked for a better group of people to be on this adventure with!

Time for bed. Oh wait…not yet! Valerie (the PA from Grand Rapids) needs another IV started. By the time is said and done, it is 1:00am

Keep us and the Haitian people in your prayers. Peace out.

Kristi Sarosiek 

I am posting this as March 4, but it really is being written March 5th. After spending quite a bit of time writing last night I was asked to restart still another IV on Valerie. When I came back I found I had temporarily lost internet connection and everything I had written was lost in cyberspace….ughh! In the scheme of things, with all I’ve seen in Haiti, a lost 40 minutes of writing is trivial! But, with that said, I will try to rewrite my blog form last night….

March 4

Fianally time to relax. It is 11:00. Where to begin.

We arrived last night (Wednesday) in time to eat dinner, check out the ORs, try to prepare for the next day’s surgery, get briefed by Diane Cable, become slightly overwhelmed by what was to come. The first thing noticed was people lying on mattresses on the floor of a 3-sided “garage”. This apparently was the “inpatient” unit (the irony, they are outside!) I was later asked to restart an IV on a Valerie, a PA from Grand Rapids who was working here the week before us and now was very sick with vomitting, diarrhea, and chest pain. She is staying in our sleeping quarters which seem to be better than the hospital. Now I am really starting to wonder what I’ve gotten myself into!

Thursday morning’s breakfast was interrrupted by a call to help a man whoose cousin fried to cut off his head with a machette (Google Haitian Voodoo). When the man man raised his hand to save himself, his hand was nearly severed. After helping Laurie get him off to sleep, I was off to my first case of the day.

To be continued…..

We had a great first day of surgery.  Many very large uteri with large fibroids, huge hydrocoels and hernias and all the patients are doing great.  They will all go home in the morning.  Double Harvest is a great place to work; hope to come back here many more times.  Diane Cable is great to work with.  We will definetly be coming back.  The place is very well supplied with the necessary instruments and surgical supplies. Have a great day from sunny Haiti.

                                   Ed Vogel