In a second-floor bed at Miami Children's Hospital, Peterson Exaïus, 9, manages a wan smile and a weak thumbs-up for visitors. On his cheek, a clear, plastic vacuum device applies suction to ruptured skin, gently summoning cells and fluids from the rest of his body to heal the flesh that was crushed when his bedroom ceiling fell on him.
He remained buried in rubble for four days. ``He doesn't want to talk,'' says his mother, Amenise Jean-Baptiste. ``He hurts.''
In a room down the hall, 14 members of the hospital's Children's Haiti Relief Team, just back from five days in Port-au-Prince, recount how they helped injured earthquake victims and how the experience changed their lives.
``At first, the patients in the medical tent were screaming and crying all night in pain,'' said Dr. Andrea Maggione, pediatrician/hospitalist. ``By the end of our stay, there wasn't so much screaming. That's how we knew we had done some good.
``This will stay with us the rest of our lives.''
Arriving nine days after the quake, quickly setting up a pediatric ward inside the University of Miami's makeshift field hospital at the Port-au-Prince airport, the Miami Children's Hospital team treated about 200 injured children.
``We didn't lose a single patient,'' Maggione said.
The team flew in with a planeload of medical equipment, including the first full anesthesia equipment in the field hospital to ease the childrens' pain. They threw sterile sheets over picnic tables in the tent for operations.
``There was total team spirit,'' said Dr. Danielle Madril, a pediatric anesthesiologist. ``We had doctors sweeping floors, moving tables.''
Dr. Steve Swirsky, orthopedic surgeon, remembered a 12-year-old boy who woke up after his leg was amputated and told a nurse, ``Go take care of the sick kids; I'm OK.''
Maggione recalled a child named Sean who lost both parents in the quake.
``He wasn't hurt badly. But he would cry all day, as soon as somebody would leave his cot. He didn't need medical care, only a human touch. That was the power of being able to help.''
Back in Peterson's room, his mother tells how he was sitting on the floor of his bedroom watching TV while a cousin sat on the bed when the quake struck. It killed the cousin and pinned Peterson's face to the floor, crushing it.
It took four days and the help of neighbors to dig the boy out. He got first aid from a nearby convent and spent two days at the city's Hpital de la Paix, where he was told to go home because they could do no more for him. When he returned two days later with maggots in his wound, he was turned away again, his mother said.
Finally, the mother heard about the UM field hospital and took him there, where he was treated and flown to Miami.
In the next room lies Junior Tunis, 17, who suffered a compound leg fracture with an open wound when his house collapsed, killing his mother. Junior's father and his older brother, Wadner, 28, put him on a scavenged door and carried him from aid station to local hospital, always being turned away for lack of beds.
He, too, finally found the UM field hospital and was flown to Miami. By then his wound, open for 12 days, was badly infected, the broken bone sticking out.
``With a major loss of soft tissue, open wounds with fractures underneath are very challenging,'' says Dr. Steven Stylianos, the hospital's head of trauma and chief of pediatric surgery. ``Usually you repair an injury like this immediately, using metal fasteners and plates on the bone. But when a wound has gone untreated for 10 or 12 days, surgeons are reluctant to put hardware into infected wounds.''
In Junior's case, they manipulated the bones together, inserted steel pins through healthy flesh a foot or more above and below the break, and attached them to a metal ``halo'' outside the skin.
As of Friday, Stylianos' team had operated on 18 Haitian patients at Miami Children's Hospital.
``Our operating room is going around the clock,'' Stylianos said. ``It's affecting everybody. I have staff members who are doing a regular shift and then spending another eight hours just helping to comfort kids.''
The patient Stylianos will remember is the 4-year-old boy who was badly dehydrated but not badly injured. When doctors rehydrated him and did routine blood tests, they discovered he had leukemia.
``It it hadn't been for the earthquake, he would have been running around untreated until the disease had progressed a lot further, and it might have been too late,'' Stylianos said.
Miami Children's Hospital hasn't added up its costs for earthquake care both in Haiti and in Miami, but Lucy Morillo, president of the hospital's foundation, estimates it will be ``in the millions.''
She asks for donations to the foundation at mchf.org/donate/.
And Jean Latouche, a Haitian-born registered nurse at Children's and part of its Haiti relief team, says her life is changed too.
``It's very emotional for me to see the patients. They're so grateful. These children are still praising God.''
Posted Friday, January 29, 2010
BY FRED TASKER, The Miami Herald
ftasker@MiamiHerald.com