Friday, April 9, 2010
Operation Smile and Haiti
Local rescue workers may have returned from Haiti, but medical volunteers are settling in for the long haul of helping earthquake victims through recovery.
Operation Smile and Physicians for Peace - two Norfolk-based medical charity groups - are still sending supplies and volunteers to help victims with rehabilitation, continuing work that was taking place even before the Jan. 12 earthquake.
Operation Smile, an international children's charity, sent its first mission to Haiti in 2008 to repair cleft palates and other facial deformities of children. Physicians for Peace helped start a "Walking Free" program there in 2005 to help disabled people with rehabilitation.
Even without an earthquake, the needs of the estimated 800,000 people with disabilities were great. People lacked prosthetics, crutches and therapists to help them survive in a country where sidewalks and roads are poor and the terrain is mountainous.
It's estimated the earthquake resulted in 2,000 to 4,000 amputations and thousands of other injuries.
After the earthquake, both organizations sent supplies such as medical equipment, prostheses, crutches and wheelchairs. Operation Smile began dispatching volunteer medical teams Jan. 25, in the organization's first disaster relief mission.
The organization has sent 11 teams of 100 medical volunteers since then, and a surgical team will leave for Haiti on Saturday.
Gail Grisetti, an associate professor of physical therapy at Old Dominion University, went with one of the Operation Smile teams in February. She previously traveled to Haiti twice with Physicians for Peace to help train people in physical therapy and establish centers where people could get crutches and prostheses.
In February, the Operation Smile team she traveled with went to a 110-bed hospital in Hinche, about a four-hour drive northeast of Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital. She treated people with fractures, crushed limbs, head injuries and, in some cases, amputations that had been done just to free them from rubble.
"The patients were all displaced," Grisetti said. "They had lost their homes. Many had staggering injuries."
Some of the patients had not gotten out of bed in weeks, so their muscles had weakened, making rehab even harder.
When Grisetti and others removed dressings, they sometimes found open wounds with bone and muscle showing. Plastic surgeons did what's called "revision surgery" to move skin and muscle around the wound in such a way that a prosthetic limb can be used.
Parents, children and other relatives stayed with victims to care for them, going out during the day to find food and medicine, later bathing them, getting rid of their waste, moving them when they needed to roll over.
One young woman, 18 or 19, had her leg amputated below the knee. Her mother would move her and do everything for her, but Grisetti told her they needed to work together to get her to do more on her own.
Grisetti showed the young woman how to sit up, get out of the bed, hop on her good leg. She used a metal chair without a back as a walker.
Another woman, 55, had lost both of her legs.
"I try to imagine her in a tent city," Grisetti said. "Would she have a wheelchair? How was she going to get around? How will she go to the bathroom? How is she going to get food? We taught her to move from the bed to a chair. Will there even be furniture?"
Physicians for Peace, which has medical programs in 22 countries, began sending physical therapists to Haiti in March. The organization is part of the newly formed Haitian Amputee Coalition, which is establishing a long-term prosthetic and rehabilitation center about 60 miles from Port-au-Prince.
Mary Kwasniewski, a senior director with Physicians for Peace, said the immediate objective is to help amputees recover. The long-term goal is to provide training for Haitians and people in nearby countries to provide therapy and rehabilitation.
"The goal is local sustainability," she said.
Elizabeth Simpson, (757) 446-2635, elizabeth.simpson@pilotonline.com
