PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Third-degree facial burns. Fractured pelvises. Infected limbs needing amputation.
The volunteer doctors and nurses comprising the LDS Church's first-response medical team has seen it all — and tried to work on most of it — in the three days they have been working to provide help and healing to earthquake-ravaged Haiti.
For the past several days, the several-block stretch of rubble-cluttered, trash-strewn streets in central Port-au-Prince between the Sacred Heart Central Hospital and the Centrale Ward LDS meetinghouse has served as a backbone for the medical team sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Now the location of service is slowly starting to change as doctors and nurses continue to find themselves able to spread out farther in the city and care for those in other areas.
And sometimes a common thread ties the two separate and distinct locations, like medical care given to a specific patient by volunteers at the meetinghouse being continued by their team peers at the hospital.
Case in point: A pair of LDS doctors working at the Centrale meetinghouse — Mark Rampton of Corvallis, Ore., and Jeremy Booth of Ogden — were helping to take a patient who needed critical care to Sacred Heart.
Just as they were delivering the patient, they aided in another, unexpected delivery. They heard a woman's scream, and Rampton aided the pregnant woman in the birth of a baby girl on the floor of the hospital hallway.
Centrale Ward meetinghouse
When the LDS medical team first arrived in the capital city on Tuesday, it set up in the Centrale meetinghouse, beginning to treat the injured among the 500 or so Haitians staying day and night on the building's gated grounds.
Available Haitian members, particularly returned LDS missionaries, served as translators between patients and medical staff. However, several volunteers took advantage of Creole- or French-language training from having served missions in Haiti, Florida or France.
They've also been assisted by local medical students in providing basic treatments and helping identify and gather supplies from the makeshift pharmacy in the meetinghouse's kitchen area.
"They're great. We couldn't do it without them," said Dan Egan, an LDS doctor from Alpine.
Volunteers estimated that each doctor and nurse at the meetinghouse clinic has seen and treated 50 to 100 patients a day, ranging from broken bones to third-degree burns to severe skin wounds.
In addition to earthquake-related injuries, the volunteers also help treat people with normal, everyday medical maladies, ones that would be treated at local clinics or hospitals, which have either been overrun with critical-care needs or rendered unusable following the quake.
Beyond Centrale
After Tuesday's first-day efforts, the medical team realized that a smaller group could staff the efforts at Centrale, freeing up a handful of others to branch out to other LDS meetinghouses and to local medical facilities.
At the Petion-ville Ward meetinghouse, a local LDS doctor, Gislaine Saint Louis, was handling medical care for the hundreds of Haitians blanketing the grounds, sports court, small parking lot and driveway.
Several members of the medical team joined Elder William "Ed" Kilgore in visiting that meetinghouse Wednesday afternoon to see if Saint Louis needed help or supplies. They ended up transferring several of the most severely injured individuals to other facilities, including a French plastic surgery clinic that had set up a critical-care tent in the middle of the street outside its building.
Additional LDS meetinghouses were visited Thursday as staff looked for more patients and more opportunities to assist.
Two of the LDS surgeons — Ray Price of Salt Lake City and Creig MacArthur of Provo — went by helicopter Wednesday to visit the Leogone area of Port-au-Prince. There they joined forces with St. George doctor Steve Hanson and a small group of LDS doctors from Utah and Arizona who had served church missions in Haiti two decades ago and had rushed down soon after the earthquake.
It was a ragtag clinic composed of interesting elements, having started at an LDS meetinghouse and moving to a nearby abandoned evangelical church complex.
"We've got the Mormons, the Mennonites and the Cubans," said Craig Nelson of American Fork, who joined his former missionary friends in helping in Leogone.
Although taking some additional medical supplies to help out in Leogone, Price reported the limitations and conditions there, using "little, throw-away children's scissors," putting patients on school desks for many amputations and seeing wounds infected with flies and maggots.
A lasting memory of the day for Price? "Having the woman whose hand we had to amputate, clutching on to me, giving me a hug as we gave her drugs to make her sleepy."
Local hospitals and more
While branching out to other LDS meetinghouses, the medical team also scoured local hospitals and clinics to see if they could help and take advantage of more extensive equipment and treat more serious injuries.
They found opportunities at nearby Sacred Heart, where several worked Wednesday and a larger group returned Thursday. They survived the scare of a small aftershock Thursday morning and later determined to find a more stable structure to work in.
At Sacred Heart, volunteers like David Sindel of Provo, Carl Mattsson of Ogden and Matt Rawlins of Spokane, Wash., scrambled to assist in rushed surgeries in the hospital's emergency and operating rooms. Treatments and surgeries also were taking place in the hallways.
Patients were being delivered in wheelbarrows and carried atop house doors, with lines snaking around the hospital courtyard and outside its wall.
Volunteers reported witnessing extreme surgeries, such as a woman with three broken bones in her hand. To serve as the rod to help set the bones, surgeons placed two medical drill bits in her hand, cutting the long bit to size with a bolt cutter.
Once out of surgery, patients — even those having undergone major operations, such as amputations of infected limbs — were wheeled outdoors and placed on cots and blankets in the courtyard, under one of some two dozen large tents and canopies to shield them from the intense Caribbean sun.
"Communications is a challenge," said Egan, sweat dripping from his nose as he bandaged a patient in the hallway and pointed out doctors from Haiti, the United States, France and Germany working side by side.
But the number of patients and would-be patients continued to overwhelm Sacred Heart, with operating rooms having to close because of the lack of sterile gowns and other routine supplies.
"No gowns, no hats, no surgical drapes," Sindel said. "That's stuff we're throwing away by the buckets back home."
Still to come
In the coming days, the volunteer LDS doctors and nurses will be spreading out even more. Several went Thursday afternoon to see if Port-au-Prince's University Hospital needed help or how they might reach the USNS Comfort, the Navy's hospital ship that has arrived in Haiti.
Starting next week, members will start to return home in small groups to Utah and elsewhere in the United States, with hopes that other volunteers will come and continue their work. They're pleased with the efforts they've given, the patients they've treated and the friends they've made.
But rather than talk about whatever sacrifices they've made to clear their work and personal schedules and donate their time and talents in Haiti, they'd rather talk about others who have done the same for them — the hospital and clinic staff who are covering for them back home.
"Our partners and other doctors back home are taking extra shifts. It's not like they weren't working 50 to 60 hours a week themselves already," said Brandon Hall, an LDS doctor from Mapleton.
"It's not easy for them to pick up extra shifts. They're probably working longer hours than we are here."
e-mail: taylor@desnews.com