Reporting from Les Cayes, Haiti

0ctober 26

Hello. My name is Courtney and I’m a Certified-Nurse Midwife and Family Nurse Practitioner who arrived in Haiti on Monday (the 22nd). I’m working and living in a town called Les Cayes (or just Cayes for short), which is in the south of the county about a 4-hour drive from Port-au-Prince. I’m working at the Hospital of the Immaculate Conception (HIC), which is the main public hospital for Les Cayes (and for a significant portion of the surrounding areas).

I’m quickly getting settled into life in Cayes, and think that I’m really going to enjoy my work and time here.

As some of you may know however, Hurricane Sandy developed this week, and certainly made my first week here interesting.  Cayes is right on the ocean—meaning at sea level—meaning that with lots of rain (i.e. daily, hard rain for 3 days straight) much of the town floods. The hospital—tragically—is not at all elevated, so it succumbed to the same fate as much of the town (see photo’s of me walking to work and the hospital). The largest building—which currently houses the maternity and men’s and women’s surgical post-op—is the lowest of them all. “Luckily” in order to get into that building there are ~1.5 foot high concrete walls (dams of sort) build into the doors—meaning you have to step over them to get into the building and that they prevent water from entering the building even if the hospital grounds are flooded. Despite these barriers (which were working) the maternity and the birthing room still had an inch of water covering it (I was told it came from underground and seeped through the floor tiles). We (the maternity nurses and doctors) worked for a day like this, but eventually the hospital closed and moved the maternity patients to a Canadian ophthalmology hospital on higher ground. It’s finally stopped raining today, so hopefully things will dry out quickly and we’ll be able to get back to HIC soon.

Despite the rain and the craziness with moving hospitals I’ve thoroughly enjoyed meeting and working with the nurses and doctors that I have. They provide the best care they can, given the resources they have available to them (which are pretty limited by American standards).

 

Hospital Entrance with Flooding

October 28

One of the things that has struck me about my work thus far in the maternity (we’re still at the Canadian hospital, although the town has dried out completely) is how family friendly it is. There is one woman on the service who has been hospitalized for at least 4 days, and 3 of her female family members (including a 1 year old) have basically moved into the hospital with her. They sleep in spare beds right next to the woman (who is hospitalized because at 20 weeks she’s been having contractions) and seem to just spend there entire day hanging out with her.

When I got to my night shift last night that woman’s family were there—as always—and there must have been 15 other visitors (of both genders) who had come to see their respective friends/family members who were at the maternity.

Most of the time the visitors are women—but we’ve had a couple husbands come to support their laboring wives. Those men have dutifully walked up and down the hallway with their wives supporting them when they have contractions, and in general have just been with them. Although the women are alone in the delivery room those husbands who are present are typically waiting anxiously outside and peer in as soon as we open the door (after the birth).

I think that it’s great that the nurses and doctors don’t mind family members sleeping in the spare beds, and on the floor when there aren’t spare beds (as was the case with the number of patients/visitors we had last night). Additionally, I really like that family and friends are so involved, supportive of the woman while she’s hospitalized, and in the case of births so excited about the new baby.