Vancouver surgeon treats injured in soccer field tent ‘hospital’

Amputations and infections plague earthquake victims in hard-hit town west of capital

By Darah Hansen, Vancouver Sun – February 3, 2010 p. A9

Dr. Donna Smith’s first night in earthquake-ravaged Haiti began on a surprisingly positive note with the birth of a baby boy.

From there, however, the experience of providing emergency medical care to hundreds of dazed and critically wounded patients took a decidedly more sombre turn.

Every day, from dawn until dusk, the 38-year-old orthopedic surgeon at St. Paul’s Hospital struggled through bone-rattling aftershocks, gun-toting bandits and primitive working conditions to treat wave after wave of crushed and broken men, women and children as young as one month.

Their injuries, she said, were “horrific.”

Indeed, two days after arriving back home in Vancouver, Smith was still trying to process all that she did and saw during her two weeks as a medical volunteer in the devastated Caribbean country. “Somehow it’s worse now being home. I keep thinking, ‘Dear Lord, did that really happen?’ ” she said in an interview Monday.

Smith arrived in Haiti Jan. 18, six days after a powerful 7.0 earthquake killed an estimated 200,000 people and reduced much of the southern portion of the impoverished country to rubble.

Working with a team of Canadian doctors, nurses and paramedics, and under the protection of the Canadian army, Smith helped to establish a treatment centre amid the ruins of Leogane, about 30 km west of Port au Prince, the capital.

Her operating room consisted of a canvas tent set up in the middle of a school soccer field.

Chasing chickens from the surgery became an every day event, as was operating under the light of a Mountain Equipment Co-op head lamp.

“It was crazy,” she said.

Broken and crushed bones embedded with dirt and cinder block were among the most common injuries recorded at the makeshift hospital, where about 250 of the most critically wounded victims were treated daily. Making the situation worse were the festering infections resulting from a lack of immediate medical care. Amputations were a frequent necessity.

Smith recalled how one desperate father begged doctors to save his eight-year-old daughter’s leg, saying he’d rather she died than be physically disabled in a country where artificial limbs are a luxury few can afford. In the end, the leg was cut off below the knee.

Another woman in her mid-’50s lost her left hand after it was pinned under rubble to a gas-burning stove for hours after the quake. By the time the woman was rescued, the hand was charred down to the bones. “Every day one of us would hear another story similar to that,” Smith said.

Yet there was also much to be learned from the stoic manner in which the Haitians greeted their tragedies.

One woman in her 40s arrived at the hospital on foot, using a tree branch as a crutch for an injured leg. An X-ray showed she had a mid-shaft femur fracture. “And she was walking,” Smith said.

Back at work Monday, where she performed nine surgeries, a media-shy Smith admitted she was still a little dazed by the intensity of her recent experience, but agreed to go public with the story in an effort to encourage public donations both to Haiti and to Providence Health Care, which allowed her to bring $75,000 worth of lifesaving medical equipment to the earthquake zone.