Doctors, Nurses Take Off on Medical Mission of Mercy
(01/28/2010) “It is horrible here. The degree of destruction and suffering is above and beyond anything that I ever imagined,” Dr. Medhat Allam of Southampton wrote in an e-mail sent from Haiti to his family on Monday
Morgan McGivern Photos
At the East Hampton Airport on Saturday morning, Medhat Allam, Joseph De Bellis, and George Keckeisen, from left, surgeons from Southampton Hospital, prepared to depart aboard donated planes.
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night. “There are so many patients that no matter how hard we work I don’t believe we are making a dent.”
Dr. Allam, a Southampton surgeon, left for Haiti from the East Hampton Airport Saturday morning along with 16 other doctors and nurses, seven of them associated with Southampton Hospital. The emergency medical mission was organized by the Southampton-based not-for-profit International Surgical Mission Support, which Dr. Allam founded in 1996 with Dr. Ravi Kothuru and Robert Mineo, a certified registered nurse anesthetist who is also in Haiti this week. On Saturday, the team of volunteers and their medical supplies traveled aboard four donated planes to West Palm Beach, where they met up with a larger plane that carried them on to Haiti.
The trip was pulled together in a matter of days with the help of many. Among the donated planes leaving East Hampton was one owned by Dr. Joseph De Bellis, a plastic surgeon and member of the surgical mission support group who keeps his Socata TBM plane at the airport here.
Over the Web, Dr. De Bellis put out a call for help to the TBM Owners and Pilots Association. Stanley Rand III and Steven Hall responded with two additional planes. Roger D’Entremont of the charitable organization Angel Flight
Stanley Rand III, who owns a TMB plane, volunteered his aircraft and his time to help transport supplies from East Hampton to Palm Beach. East Hampton Town Supevisor Bill Wilkinson talked with him at the airport on Saturday as the sun was rising. |
helped to round up the third plane, a Piaggio 180 owned by David Turock, who also donated the services of two professional pilots.
Michael Myers of Myers Aero Service donated fuel for the planes that took off from East Hampton, and in West Palm Beach, pilots received a discount to refuel.
On Saturday morning, it was 24 degrees and the sun was barely above the horizon when the planes began to arrive on the tarmac in East Hampton. Because the medical team had so much equipment, loading the planes was a challenge in itself.
“Small airplanes are limited as to how far they can fly by how much weight they’re carrying,” Mr. Rand explained on the phone on Tuesday. The passengers and cargo had to be parceled out among the planes. A large box truck donated by Berkoski Ice, Oil, and Security left Southampton Friday loaded with still more supplies and equipment and met the volunteers in Florida.
The original plan was to stop in West Palm to refuel before going on to Haiti, but only one landing slot could be secured in Port-au-Prince, according to Mr. Rand. In addition, insurance underwriters were willing to allow the planes into Haiti only under very restricted conditions, Dr. De Bellis wrote in an e-mail from Haiti yesterday morning.
A friend of his put him in touch with Earle Mack, former ambassador to Finland and a part-time South Fork resident, who was sponsoring flights to Haiti from West Palm. “Ambassador Mack assured us that if we can get down to West Palm, he would get us to Haiti,” Dr. De Bellis wrote.
Medical supplies and equipment for the team's mobile operating rooms were loaded onto one of the donated planes on Saturday morning. |
So the volunteers and their supplies transferred in Florida to the larger plane, finally arriving at their destination around 9 p.m. Saturday.
“I have been here for three days and it feels like I have been here forever,” Dr. Allam wrote in his e-mail on Monday night. People needing surgical attention were on the floors of hospitals, in the streets, “basically everywhere.” Early in the week the volunteers, who traveled with their own mobile operating rooms, were working out of converted space at the Haiti Community Hospital. Dr. Allam observed that Haiti seems to be suffering not from a lack of doctors willing to help, but from a lack of equipped facilities that can accommodate them in their work.
Without recovery rooms to keep patients in after surgery, they must recuperate in tents set up across the street from the hospital by French volunteers, Dr. Allam wrote. “The smell of gangrene and infection is intolerable.” The team has spent every day, all day, doing amputations, surgically cleaning infected wounds, and performing skin grafts.
“The degree of misery is indescribable,” he said. He wrote of children recovering after amputations who had no one to comfort them because all of their family members had died, and of a young woman whose hand was badly infected after a previous amputation and needed to have her final two fingers removed.
“I do not think I will recover from this trauma of watching her crying. Only God knows how she will recover from the trauma of having her hand amputated,” he wrote. “Despite TV and media attention to the disaster we were not mentally prepared.”
“The nurses from Southampton Hospital who are here are amazing, working continuously scrubbing, cleaning, moving patients endlessly and tirelessly,” Dr. Allam said, adding that he is proud to be with them.
Three operating room nurses from Southampton Hospital are on the mission: Mary Rose Wiseman-Doyle, Patricia Mitchell, and Stephanie Porey. Giving them up was difficult, said Kathy Nielsen-Havlik, a nurse in the recovery room, but other nurses have been glad to rearrange their schedules to help cover for them in their absence.
Other doctors on the trip who are associated with the hospital are George Keckeisen and Gregory Dalencourt, surgeons, John Levitsky, an anesthesiologist, and Angela Soteriou, an internist.
The volunteers are staying in tents in the backyard of Dr. Dalencourt’s in-laws, who live outside of Port-au-Prince. Dr. Dalencourt grew up in Haiti. They are expected to return to Florida tomorrow.
Although International Surgical Mission Support plans annual humanitarian missions all over the world and has worked in Haiti several times, this last-minute trip is its first in the aftermath of a disaster. The group is in the midst of planning a regularly scheduled humanitarian mission to Egypt in March.
Those who wish to contribute to the organization’s efforts can donate online at ismission.org, or by mail, in care of Dr. Medhat Allam, 365 County Road 39, Southampton 11968.
With Reporting by Morgan McGivern