PORT-AU-PRINCE, (Reuters) – The key to working in a disaster zone hospital, where casualties pile up faster than patients can be discharged, is to avoid getting emotionally involved, says Dr. Ofer Merin, an Israeli army trauma surgeon working in the earthquake-shattered Haitian capital.
Merin, heading a fully equipped hospital brought in by the Israeli military, said the hardest job was triage — deciding which casualties were most likely to live with quick treatment or most benefit from intensive care without blocking up beds.
It also is vital not to fret about what will happen to orphaned children with limbs in casts who have to be discharged to free up needed beds, Merin said.
“These are ethical decisions we’re not used to taking,” he told Reuters on a break from his around-the-clock schedule.
“You try to have almost no emotional connection with the patients, which is so different to what we do back home. You just cannot get emotional in a disaster this big.” He breaks into a grin, though, over four babies born at the camp hospital. One of them is a tiny girl named Sourire — French for “Smile” — whose two-months-premature birth may have been triggered by the trauma of Tuesday’s massive earthquake.
As Merin shows off the facilities, a skinny 6-year-old girl called Jessica is carried in, plastered with grime, dust and flies, and is scrubbed from head to foot with disinfectant.
Six days after the quake, she has just been dug out of the rubble of her collapsed family home. She is too weak to stand so her aunt, who cannot stop repeating “Thank you, God,” holds the trembling girl upright for a nurse.
“When they lifted her out we could not believe she was alive,” the aunt told Reuters. “She opened her eyes wide and said, ‘My name is Jessica Chatain and I am hungry and thirsty.’ She didn’t cry but her parents wept a human sea.”
Set up in green army tents on a soccer field near the airport but equipped to treat even complex injuries, the Israeli military hospital is strangely quiet and scrupulously clean. Patients are identified with bar codes and their progress is tracked on a computer network.
