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Area surgeon assists Haitian quake victims
By Kim Nguyen, Staff writer
In the destruction left behind by the earthquake and subsequent aftershocks, millions of Haitians are without medical attention, but a team of North Texas doctors, nurses and medical technicians have decided to take action.
Dr. Nirmal Jayaseelan, general and bariatric surgeon at Medical City Dallas, was one of the medical professionals who volunteered to go.
Doctors at a nearby privately owned practice began assembling a team to fly to Cap-Haïtien, a city on the north coast of Haiti, Friday morning.
The flight plan was quickly changed to Port-au-Prince, and the group left Saturday morning.
“It all happened very quickly, and I was very surprised with how quickly everything came together,” he said. “By the time we arrived at Love Field to take off, we realized there were more volunteers to go than the plane had room for.”
The team was able to see the devastation long before the plane began its descent into Port-au-Prince, Jayaseelan said.
“We were flying over the beautiful Caribbean Sea, but as we got closer to Haiti, we began seeing plumes of smoke rising into the air and planes and helicopters flying around. It was very dramatic.”
As soon as the team landed, they were transported to an area community hospital. There they immediately began setting up a treatment area and tending to patients, who had already begun lining up outside the hospital.
“We basically set up a MASH unit and began working as soon as we arrived at the hospital,” Jayaseelan said. (MASH stands for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital.)
Jayaseelan said with the rubble falling from unstable buildings during the quake and subsequent aftershocks, the majority of the locals he treated were suffering from “crush wounds” in the extremities.
“Fractures that are unopened and not infected can be treated relatively easily with a cast, but many of the locals’ injuries were grossly infected,” he said. “Unfortunately, the last resort was to treat it by amputation.”
Jayaseelan said he also performed relatively minor procedures on victims that helped keep the wounds from infection and decay.
After a few hours, the team was asked to go to a nearby small and privately owned hospital to treat more patients. With three general surgeons, three anesthesiologists, one orthopedic surgeon, one head and neck surgeon, one plastic surgeon and about a dozen nurses and operating room technicians, the team easily split into two.
Jayaseelan said he volunteered to go to the private hospital.
“There I pretty much operated from 4 to 10 [p.m.]; I was exhausted,” he said. “Then five surgeons from New York City came and took over. They operated through the night, and when I woke up the next morning, I went right back into operating.”
The group of doctors, nurses and medical technicians were limited to a 36-hour stay due to the unorganized state of the government in the early days after the earthquake.
During his 36 hours there, Jayaseelan said he met several medical and emergency professionals from all over the world who stopped what they were doing at home to come to the aid of the quake victims.
“Even though it was a dangerous situation, there were a lot of people who were there to help. I met emergency response people from Hungary and Russia, and surgeons from New York City, Miami and Melbourne, Fla.,” he said. “It was very heartwarming, but also heart-wrenching at the same time, because of all the devastation there.”
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