By Jonathan Tuttle
chh@heraldsun.com; 419-6654
CHAPEL HILL -- "At my age, you need to have some adventure in your life," said Patrick Guiteras of Chapel Hill Family Medicine. "And I don't mean that in a frivolous way."
Just after Valentine's Day, Guiteras, a physician, took a seven-hour bus ride from the center of the Dominican Republic to the border with Haiti as hundreds of Haitians, many with broken arms and legs, traveled in tractors and helicopters from the opposite direction, from 40 miles away in Port-au-Prince.
The International Medical Alliance, a nonprofit corporation, had staffed a hospital in Jimani with volunteer surgeons, anesthesiologists and nurses from across the United States.
They opened the hospital for amputation and surgery, converted a chapel into a children's hospital and set up tents for those recovering after their operation, victims of the Jan. 12 earthquake. Guiteras worked in one such tent, treating 100 patients in four days.
"We intended to work five days," he said. "But travel there is unreliable."
When a bus came after the fourth day, Guiteras and his former medical school classmate, Franklin Tew, assumed there might not be another coming soon and packed their things.
Tew was reluctant when Guiteras, his friend of 45 years, first pitched the idea of traveling together to the Dominican Republic to help in the relief effort. But Guiteras, betting that the retired Tew had time on his hands, pressed further.
"You learn about yourself and about other people," Guiteras said of working in emergency situations. "Plus, you have something for the grandchildren to talk about at Thanksgiving."
After founding his practice, Chapel Hill Family Medicine, in 1975, Guiteras helped clinics in Guatemala and Mexico, though the struggles he saw there were not on the scale of the disaster in Haiti.
When his daughter sent him an e-mail with information for lending his skills to the effort in Haiti, Guiteras took the opportunity, but with the knowledge that his help would be vastly disproportionate to the earthquake's harm.
Guiteras said the early, horrific accidents had slowed by the time he and Tew arrived, but there was still plenty to do.
Over the dirt floor inside his tent, Guiteras and Tew began each day with morning rounds, checking the vital signs of their patients.
They were assisted by two "wonderful" young men from a nearby village who worked to translate the patients' native Creole into Spanish.
After morning rounds, Guiteras tended to the daily crises, sudden fevers and infections. At night, he and Tew slept on the floor of a hospital dorm room. The days were warm and breezy, reaching 90 degrees.
"Thank God it didn't rain," he said.
Though the hospital porch was stocked with donated antibiotics and supplies, a tent in Jimani is a far way off from modern medical convenience. Without respiration machines or easily available blood transfusions, Guiteras had to rely on basic clinical skills, to use a stethoscope when he would have used a chest x-ray.
"I learned I could function in a primitive setting," he said. "We weren't coddled like we are here. It was basically 19th century medicine and it was rewarding."
The experience in Haiti was also a reminder of a fact, perhaps obvious but easily forgotten: some have it worse off than others.
Guiteras treated one patient, an old man with an amputated leg, who often asked when he could return to his business in Port-au-Prince.
"I don't know what was waiting for him there," said Guiteras. "The real question is: What happens next? How do you rebuild a life and a business?"
Guiteras admits he has no clue what form Haiti's future will take.
"The enormousness of it is mind boggling," he said. "I hope they can restore something, but I don't know."
