follow up

I've been getting follow up emails from some of the doctors and nurses that have been returning home from Fond Parisien. One of the doctors I worked with, Keegan Checkett from Chicago sent me an email which included the following (first let me say that it was of course a huge collective effort on the part of all of the nurses there):

On a happy note, for which I think you deserve a lot of credit: the Navy is so impressed by the excellent wound care provided for the patients in ex-fixes, that they're thinking about writing an article/doing a study! Seriously. Usually, ex-fixes are so nasty, they have to be taken out & the pt treated with abx for a few weeks, before definitive surgery can take place. We transferred ~30 pts with ex-fixes to the Comfort....and all of them were able to get immediate surgery, since their wounds looked so awesome ;-)

It's great to hear that we may have made a difference for the patients we took care of. I think it's rare in life when a person is lucky enough to be in the one place in the world at a moment where they're needed more than anywhere else - and all of the nurses were able to experience that with our patients in Haiti. I will always be thankful for my time there, and for the awesome nurses I worked with.
Keegan also mentioned that Vanessa, our patient (I've included a photos of Vanessa above, she's pictured with Dr. Dianne Sampson) with the pelvic external fixator had been able to have it removed and had been discharged. So it was great to get that news. Another nurse, Tracy Jarden emailed me from Haiti last week, and said that she had visited Port-au-Prince and saw virtually no sign of anyone trying to clean up the rubble or re-build the city. That's so discouraging - where is all the money that has been raised? I can only hope that the Haitians will actually see some of that money used to rebuild their country.
While writing this, I realized that I never thanked my co-workers at Alta View and Intermountain Medical Center for covering my shifts while I was in Haiti. I literally recieved my e-ticket from Operation Smile at 8pm the night before my flight which departed at 7am the next morning. So there was not a lot of time to find coverage, and everyone was more than willing to help me. So a big thank you/shout out to all my co-workers!