Propac for Haiti

Tara and I testing the ProPaq that we
are bringing for the new HAH PACU

We're continuing down, getting ready for our mid-June mission to Haiti. The hospital where we will be working, Hopital Adventiste d'Haiti, until recently did not have any Recovery Room facilities for patients undergoing surgery. They simply were woken up in the OR, and transported to the floor. Needless to say, this is not the safest scenario, but it is one that is repeated daily in small hospitals throughout the developing world. We read about another orthopedic group that was visiting HAH a few months ago, and had a disaster occur in a 10 year old girl a few hours after surgery. Apparently the child did fine initially, but was found without signs of life on the ward a few hours after surgery. There is no way of telling if a recovery room (PACU - post anesthesia care unit) would have saved her life, but in any case, the hospital administration decided that it was time to invest in a PACU. To help bolster this effort, we are bringing down four PACU/ICU nurses to help train the local Haitian nurses.

Alex Herzenberg packing gear for Haiti

We also are bringing a donation from Operation Rainbow, in the form of an advanced (well actually, used and refurbished) ProPaq monitor for their newly minted PACU. This allows monitoring of a patient's blood pressure, temperature, and heart rate, and pulse oximetry simultaneously during the first few critical hours after surgery. We tested it out on a young man who had come over the house to tutor Brittany in her schoolwork. Poor fellow found himself hooked up to leads and cuffs, and electrodes, and then John started interrogating him. It looked like a scene taken from "Meet the Parents"...
We approach our mission with both excitement and trepidation, hoping that the Lord will watch over us and over our patients. Our goal is to go, do good work, and get all our team members back home safely, and leave all the patients healthy and healing.