On the Web

Visit www.heraldsun.com to read April Perry's Log from Haiti and to see more photos from her time there.

By Neil Offen

noffen@heraldsun.com; 419-6646

DURHAM -- In her warm and cozy living room, April Perry sat on her cushy green couch, her greyhound Bailey nestled sleepily by her side, the dog's head in her lap. There were deep circles under Perry's warm, friendly eyes.

Twelve hours or so earlier, she had been tending to children who were suffering from gangrene, hanging IVs from tree branches, changing dresses on grievous injuries, watching over those who had just had a leg or a foot amputated.

She had been in Haiti.

Despite all she had seen, despite all she had done, despite the psychological disconnect of returning to her comfortable northern Durham home, Perry said, "I went there feeling hopeless. But I've come back feeling hope."

Just days after the devastating earthquake that has ravaged the island, Perry -- a nurse at Duke University Medical Center and the founder and head of Luke's Mission, a Durham-based nonprofit that helps run medical missions and orphanages in Haiti -- left on a disaster relief mission with the N.C. Baptist Men Relief Organization.

She spent 10 days on the Caribbean island, providing medical and post-operative care just outside the capital of Port-au-Prince. It was a facility -- like all in Haiti now -- overwhelmed by need, with insufficient supplies and personnel, and with a growing tent city outside its doors.

And yet.

"Amazingly to me, life is going on there, in Haiti," Perry said. "There are markets in the middle of the rubble. People are trying to living their lives. The city's not paralyzed. All the businesses are closed, but there are vendors out in the street and that gave me hope."

Perry is no stranger to disaster. She has been to Haiti dozens of times and she spent six days helping out in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Consequently, "I wasn't shocked in Haiti," Perry said. "It wasn't worse that I could have imagined." she said. But still, she added, "it is terrible, just terrible."

For her, what was worst, she recalled, was seeing what had happened to the orphanage Luke's Mission had supported in the town of Fondwa, and the "two nuns I had grown to love" there.

The orphanage building had crumbled. The two nuns, with their 50 or so charges, were living outside, their walls pieces of clothing hung from trees.

"They had no water, no food, no sanitation," Perry said. "One of the nuns had a broken leg. And there was no help in sight." Perry sighed deeply.

Despite her experience with disaster, despite her training, the extent of the effects of the earthquake, the endless numbers of children now orphaned, all those now with lost limbs, all that was emotionally draining and exhausting, Perry acknowledged.

"Still, I feel very, very good that we did what we needed to do," she said.

She felt particularly good, she recalled, about one little girl.

On the fourth or fifth day she was there, two young men came in with the girl -- maybe 4 years old -- on a stretcher and put her in the one empty bed in Perry's ward.

"I didn't even notice her much except out of the corner of my eye," she said. "It took several minutes for me to get to her but once I came within 20 feet of her bed it was clear what the problem was."

The girl had gangrene, and "the smell of gangrene is not one that you can forget. I knew she had it before I even laid eyes on her."

A piece of paper at the end of the bed said the girl had been dropped of at the ER with no parents. They weren't able to get her complete name. The paper said she had gangrene in her left leg and severe lacerations and wounds on her right leg and hip. The paper called for an "ortho consult in the AM."

That had been written at 10 p.m. the night before and it was now 1 p.m. the following day.

"The toes I could see on her left foot clearly were gangrenous," Perry said. "Apparently someone had found her now 12 days after the earthquake and simply brought her to the ER. How she survived in the meantime is a miracle in itself."

The girl needed X-rays and then had to get to the operating room. But there was no one to take her there, no stretchers available.

After 15 minutes of waiting, Perry picked the girl up, wrapped her in the sheet and tucked her into her shirt. With her translator holding an IV that had been started, they walked her down to X-ray.

She had gas gangrene -- a very serious form of the condition -- but no fractures. "When I went to the surgeon and told him the X-rays were ready to read, he looked at them and said we needed to take her right now in order to try to save some portion of her leg," Perry remembered.

So Perry grabbed her up again and carried her over to the OR and left her with the surgeon. Her leg was amputated below the knee and her other wounds were cleaned and dressed. Other injuries -- gaping holes on her hip and the back part of her other leg -- would be dealt with later. But her life had been saved.

"It was an extraordinary experience," Perry said. "A child brought in 12 days after the earthquake for her first evaluation, no parents, no one with her and who almost got lost in the system.

"What I had done was part of my training and second nature," she said. "But it made me think of what might have happened if I had been more tired, more stressed, and might have missed this opportunity to save this child's life."

On the morning after she returned from Haiti, Perry said she needed time to re-adjust from experiences like that. "I'm finding myself more in need of quiet time," she said. "Frankly, I'm really not anxious to see anybody."

But she knew she had to. "I had to bring this story back," Perry said. "Everyone has to know what has happened there, and how much help the Haitian people need."

The photos with this story are courtesy of Luke's Mission.