First Responders: The DMAT Team (Fall '10)

Anesthesiologist and team member Judy O'Young documents her experiences deploying with the team and working surgical cases in Haiti in the initial days following the earthquake. Published in the Fall 2010 edition of The Permanente Journal.

Twilight on Tuesday, January 12, 2010 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti: about 40 seconds of chaos. 7.0 magnitude. Buildings begin to crack and the sound makes people think of the gunfire that is all too frequent in the downtown area. For safety, people run inside. Buildings, shoddily constructed, crumple, trapping those inside. One of the best hotels, the Montana, on a verdant hillside overlooking the steaming plain of lowland Port-au-Prince, pancakes entombing more than 300 people. The air is thick with heat and the dust of concrete.

Afternoon on Tuesday, January 12, 2010 in Oakland, CA: news on the car radio tells me I will make my fourth trip to Haiti sooner than planned...

Disaster in Haiti: A Personal Journey (01 Sep '10)

Team member Kate Amatruda wrote an article on her deployment experiences in Haiti. This article appeared in the July/August 2010 issue of The Therapist, the publication of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (CAMFT), headquartered in San Diego, California. This article is copyrighted and been reprinted with the permission of CAMFT. For more information regarding CAMFT, please log on to http://www.camft.org/.

It is the smell of the decomposing bodies of dead children at the collapsed school in the Delmas area of Port-au-Prince and the knowledge that their remains may never be recovered that stays with me. Returning to our medical tent, I work with Cassandre*, who tells me that she was one of only three children who survived the destruction of her school. She is thirteen years old. When she was rescued after three days of being trapped in the rubble, she found out that her mother had been killed in the catastrophic 7.0 earthquake of January 12, 2010. We are the first medical team she has seen, now eight days after the quake. She may lose her leg, due to a fracture that has become badly infected. Gangrene has set in.

Help For Haiti (23 Apr '10)

Team members Barbara Morita and Keith Sheirich are quoted in this Clinician's Review article.

Listening to NPs and PAs talk about their experiences in disaster response following the devastating earthquake in Haiti is an endurance test for the tear ducts. Transcending the frustrations over delays in delivery of care, beyond the horror of severely infected wounds and partial amputations, mingled with the sense of wonder at the Haitian people's gratitude for the most basic care, there are stories of people — patients and providers — that would warm even the most jaded heart.