I feel like I know Hopital de la Communaute Haitienne like the back of my hand after the last three days. So I'll just call it HCH from now on, because I feel like I'm entitled now that we are on such familiar terms. HCH is a community hospital in Petionville located off Rue Frere. How came I to this intimate knowledge of HCH? It's a long story, but I will try to write it as succinctly as possible.

One of the guys in the group that Mom has been hosting for the past week here in Gwo Jan, Lamont, fell down onto his back while getting out the van at one of our stops on Thursday. He waved it off like any young man would, saying he just tweaked his knee. I didn't see the incident though, but I was told by one of our companions that he had landed on his back. Friday morning, as we were preparing to leave to go to Leogane, the epicenter of the earthquake and a great tourist attraction these days (I say facetiously), Lamont complained that his lower back was a little sore, like he had slept on it wrong. He took a couple aspirin and we went on our way. After the hour-long drive, we stopped at a gas station in Leogane and some of the Gwo Jan guys who came with us (more about them later, it's a group of young men who organized themselves to help with rebuilding efforts) tried to help Lamont stretch his back because they thought it must be a sore muscle or something. The stretching didn't help.

Lamont's back felt worse and worse on the way back to Port-au-Prince, and by the time we got out of the car in Gwo Jan, he could barely walk because of the pain and needed assistance to get down the stairs to our house. He was laid on one of the beds in "my" room, where I've been sleeping but also sharing with the group since they left their bags in there and have been using it to shower and brush teeth and collect themselves every day. He said his left hip in the back was really hurting him, and he was in constant pain even lying down and not moving. We gave him some pain killers and I tried to make him comfortable. I tried looking up back pain on Google but the internet had decided to check out for the day (a frequent occurance which is why I haven't been updating this blog very much). I put a pillow between his knees and put him into a fetal position. He could barely move without yelling about the pain at this point. I slept fitfully. He called me to help him to the bathroom, and I think at this point I realized that if a 26-year-old man from Brooklyn was desperate enough to need me to carry him to the toilet (it was actually more a piggy back ride/shuffle), then we definitely needed to get him to a hospital. He felt really hot to the touch too, and when I finally dragged him back to bed he started vomiting. Uh oh.

In the morning, as the news spread that beloved Lamont was sick (everyone has fallen in love with him here), it seemed like all of Gwo Jan was in the bedroom with him to check in on him. Haitians don't really have a thought for privacy when it comes to sickness, by the way. They'll just come right on in and look at you lying there. But it's really just their way of showing they care.
They arranged for a van to come up and take him down to the hospital, and they put a mattress and blankets over the front seat so Lamont could lie down in semi comfort. Dad, Williamson, Najee and someone else carried Lamont up to the van and put in, hollering the whole time from the excruciating pain of being moved. I thought he had broken his back.

Dieula started crying, Williamson and me and Mom were crying, because the sounds that issued from Lamont were so heartbreaking, and everyone in the van with us knew that the bumpy road ahead of us down the mountain was going to be cruel. Our driver tried as hard as he could to go slow, but that road seems to be made of boulders and ravines on a good day. Pastor Bazin, a neighbor, on his knees on the front makeshift bed, supported Lamont's torso with his arms the whole way down, while Mom, in the passenger seat in front, faced backwards and supported Lamont's left leg. I sat in the seat behind Lamont with Dieula and Williamson, and I supported his right leg while squeezing his hand. Williamson poured water over Lamont's head and washed his face while Dieula sang church songs and prayed. I can't imagine how bad that trip down was for Lamont. And just as we were almost to Rue Frere, where the road is paved and smooth, we saw a big Mack truck broken down, blocking our way, and we had to back track and find another road, even more rocky, around the blockage.

We finally made it to HCH. We parked in front of the emergency room entrance and Mom ran in to get someone. Then we saw her run back out and head to the front entrance. Puzzling. Diane, one of the group members who came to Haiti with Lamont, was in the back of the van and got out and went to help Mom find a doctor. They returned in 20 minutes with a volunteer nurse from North Carolina. Turns out the reception at the emergency room told Mom there was no room for anyone and on top of that, didn't even get up to see what was going on. Mom asked if there were any American doctors there and was told no. Turns out, if you go into the front entrance of the hospital, the place is teeming with American medical workers. I was enraged. I mean, come on. If you're going to have an emergency room open, have a care, have a doctor there, something.

Anyway, the nurse, Nicole, got some of her volunteer team to get a gurney and got Lamont situated in the doctor's lounge of the hospital. She got Lamont hooked up to an IV, took his blood pressure and announced that it was too low to give him any narcotics. Damn! She needed some 10 cc syringes, and sent Mom to go look in the bulk storage closet. Meanwhile, Nicole sent me to get some test tubes for blood samples from the lab downstairs. Now, I have been fortunate enough not to have much hospital experience but I'm pretty sure this doesn't happen in the States. I ran downstairs to the lab, rang the doorbell several times, and when after I got no response I just opened the door to the lab and asked one of the technicians for the tests that Nicole needed. Back upstairs, Nicole drew Lamont's blood, sent me back down to the lab with it and specific instructions for several blood tests that I needed to have her write down for me, then translate to the lab tech in Creole, then was told that they didn't have the capability to do all of the tests Nicole wanted done. Well, at least they could do a malaria smear but it would take a day to get the results. Then I was sent to Radiology to schedule the x-ray for Lamont.

One obstacle to getting proper care for Lamont was that he hadn't actually been admitted into the hospital but was only being treated there by the American nurses. So when I asked for blood tests and an x-ray, the lab and the radiology department wanted to see his hospital slip. But hello! They pretty much turned us away at the emergency room so we had to do what we had to do. Mom and I just sweet-talked them into getting the blood tests and the x-ray done though, pretty, pretty please. Since Lamont hadn't been given any pain killer since he got to the hospital, he had to bear the cot ride downstairs again (literally, since there is no elevator) and endure the sheet pull manuever to get him onto the horrendously outdated x-ray machine. Curiously, the x-rays didn't show anything broken in his back or hip or femur.

Once back up in the doctor's lounge, Lamont conked out from lack of sleep the previous night and from the exhaustion of the trip and the pain, and it was only noon. Mom and Diane left to go to the airport to change his ticket because he was supposed to be leaving that day to go home. I was left to take care of him. Because he also had diarrhea, his sleep was short-lived. He had to brave the pain in order to get up to use the bathroom, and I could only feel the utmost sympathy because I could see how painful it was for him to move. I had to be very deliberate to help him off the bed. The bathroom seemed about a mile away because there were no wheelchairs, just an office chair with wheels and I had to manuever that out the door while holding his IV and go down the hall, lift him up again and shuffle piggyback to the toilet.

We got him situated in a bare, but private room downstairs, which actually had a bathroom, although the toilet handle was missing and the only way to flush the toilet was to take the top of the tank and lift the plug manually. The room had lots of mosquitos so I sprayed the walls and sheets with mosquito spray. Since the nurses were busy, I went upstairs and raided the storage closet for a bed pan, some soap and a towel for the room. We finally got some pain pills around 5 because Nicole found his blood pressure to be high enough. Diane and Mom called, saying that there was an emergency and they needed to go pick up some other people who'd just had a car accident, and so I stayed at the hospital until Diane came to relieve me at 10 p.m. Let me just note that Lamont had not been seen by a doctor yet, just a nurse, Nicole, who at least taught me how to change the IV bag and monitor the drip rate before she left for the night. Oh, and then there was pretty much no medical staff there at night.

Yesterday morning Mom and I came back to the hospital bright and early to discover that Lamont still had a fever, still in great pain, and heard stories from Diane about the rats that tried to come in the room all night. I relieved her from hospital duty and she and Mom left to go back to the airport to try to change Lamont's ticket again, and if that didn't work, the American embassy. This time Sarah, Dieula's daughter, had come along to help out and was my company and teammate for the care of Lamont. She was amazing. By noon, though, we hadn't seen anyone come by to check on him, so I was out exploring the hospital, remarkably empty, but it was Sunday. I had just returned a pair of scissors to the clinich and got to talking to some American nurses who, once they realized that Lamont wasn't being attended, immediately jumped to action and gave him iv injections for nausea, which thankfully put him to sleep, as well as extra electrolytes and antibiotics. I think everyone had thought that Diane was a doctor, since she was wearing clothes that resembled scrubs, so they assumed he was being cared for already. And since he was an "admitted" patient, no Haitian doctors, if there were any, stopped in. But as soon as the nurses found out, they worked their magic and we finally got a flurry of activity coming in, including a nurse called Melanie who totally took it upon herself to network and find a flight for Lamont on Tuesday in a small aircraft to Florida.

In the meantime, he had to be stable enough to be transported, which means he had to spend another night in the hospital, which Sarah and I both agreed we would spend with him. We found two chairs apiece and somehow slept. The night was pretty uneventful, with Lamont so doped up he slept most of the night, with one trip to the bathroom. No rats came in sight, but there were plenty of mosquitos. Morning came with Diane and Mom and nurse Melanie and news that Lamont could get on a plane to Florida on Tuesday. I left for Gwo Jan around noon to shower and nap, write this up, grab Lamont's suitcase and things, and head back down to the hospital.

On top of the exhaustion though, I think all I feel right now is just gratitude to those volunteer nurses who came to our rescue. Thank you for coming to Haiti!