Pictures of Haiti

And now a brief tour of the hospital:

The gated entrance to the hospital campus, from the inside












The outside of our headquarters at the hospital; it used to be the "pavillion des internes," or the living quarters for the interns.











The lab. Labs had to be walked over, and woe betide the person who didn't get a number: no results could be received without it! There were no stat labs; mostly you had to wait for the next day. We had two I-Stat machines, but as you probably are aware, they don't work well in 100-degree heat. We kept it in a cooler, and then had to dry it off and gently warm it up, and even then it often didn't work.





The radiology department.













The medicine ward--or the "catacombs."













The TB clinic; outpatients would come here for their daily meds. The inpatient TB tents are just behind it.











One of the three TB tents.













Part of the ICU--the "higher acuity" beds that were just across from the med room/nurses' station. The guy in the first bed was unresponsive and febrile--he was seizure vs cva vs meningitis; I think he died. The young girl in the next bed had severe TB empyema; got a chest tube, convalesced, and actually recovered enough to be discharged to an outpatient TB clinic. The woman in the far bed had kidney failure; she was dialyzed a few times and was transferred to the medicine ward, only to come back in severe distress and die.


One of our two little vents.













The crazy oxygen setup. That 100-lb tank was supplying 02 to the entire ICU. The man in the cap in the background is a translator--he was the guru of the oxygen. Anytime we needed 02 strung to a bed, we yelled for him and he would make it work. The tank would run out a couple of times a day--usually we'd notice when the girl with the chest tube (two pictures above) would desat to 65, and point to her oxygen mask. We'd have to radio for the oxygen guy to bring us another tank. Nothing ever happens fast in Haiti.



More pictures and stories to come!