Operation Haiti

By Sylvia Campbell, Tampa, Florida

As appeared in

I opened my eyes, not feeling rested at all.

Was it morning? In the windowless operating room of King’s Hospital in Port-au-Prince, days seemed to never really begin or end.

I crawled out of my sleeping bag and stood, stretching out the kinks from sleeping on the floor. It was January 20, my third morning in Haiti. I came as soon as I could after the January 12 earthquake, confident in my 20 years of experience as a surgeon, certain I could help, that I was answering God’s distinct call. But what I’d found was misery and desperation, a brokenness no doctor could heal.

I felt the floor rock slightly. Then, the walls began moving, buckling. Screaming, from outside the OR. “Run! Get out!” Panicked patients poured into the hallway, running, hobbling, crawling for the entrance one floor below us. Family members pushed patients in their beds, carried them on boards, any way they could. It was a jarring aftershock.

But in the terrified faces around me I saw something more. They were reliving the horror of January 12.

I’d been to Haiti on medical mission trips more than two dozen times. It was the people who kept me coming back. Their incredible strength and perseverance filled me with such hope.

Now, all around me in this 70-bed hospital was pain and suffering. And each day brought only more, victims arriving by the hundreds, limbs crushed beyond repair, infected, gangrene setting in—looking to me and the other docs for what little healing we could provide.

Outside the entrance some patients milled about in nervous throngs, mixing with new people arriving that morning. Others collapsed to the ground. Word finally came that it was safe to go back inside.

“The aftershock is over,” I yelled over the buzzing crowd. “Please return to your rooms.” Other doctors made similar pleas, but the patients didn’t move except to shake their heads. For them, the hospital was no longer a place of refuge.

We walked through the crowd, writing names and injuries on surgical tape and putting it around patients’ arms, urging them not to leave the grounds. I’d treated so many of them. The woman who had lost her family. The preacher whose wife was dying. Men, women and children whose crushed limbs I’d amputated.

I’d done all I could, but the need was overwhelming. For most, I couldn’t even get meds for their pain. Their moans filled my ears, drowning out the hope that coming to Haiti always held. If only I could feel that hope again.

I remembered an engineering student I’d treated the day before. He’d been taking a test at the university when the quake hit. His right arm was badly fractured, infected. Amputation was the only option.

“There must be some chance,” he said. The strength of his faith touched me. I cleaned and dressed the wound and said, “Let’s look at it again tomorrow.” It seemed impossible that there’d be any change. But I knew we both needed something to cling to—if even for a day.

At the hospital entrance a doctor called to the crowd. “We’ve all been through a terrible shock. I would ask you to please join me in prayer.”

“Dear God,” he said, “you know everything that we’re going through. Please protect this hospital and help it to be a haven for all who come here.”

The patients lifted their heads. There was quiet, a sense of calm. Remarkably, some people trickled back into the hospital. But for others the fear quickly returned to their faces. They refused to go near the building. I understood.