Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Patience and perseverance
Mike Thralls has made eight trips to Haiti. His ninth was unlike any other.
Thralls, a Wishard paramedic, led a medical mission team to Port-au-Prince less than two weeks after one of the most catastrophic natural disasters in modern history.
His team arrived in the Caribbean nation, which shares an island with the Dominican Republic, twelve days after a 7.0-magnitude shook much of the capital to rubble and killed an estimated at 150,000, a number that rises with each passing day. More than one million people are believed to be displaced.
Thralls, along with his wife, Melanie, led a team of medical professionals to deliver desperately needed supplies and care to the people of Haiti over the course of five days there.
“We felt it was a very successful mission,” Thralls said. “When you look at it, in 18 days we went from a disaster, with no plans, to a complete mission, equipped, departed, fulfilled and returned safely – and then drove through a 200-year snowstorm to get home.”
The team set up a clinic at the Morning Star Christian Academy, where the team provided care for 800-1,000 people and helped many more with the supplies, food and water left behind. Beyond providing care directly, the team also taught Haitian teachers and patients at the school how to scrub and bandage wounds, how to identify which medications worked best for pain control, which antibiotics to use, and how to cast and splint orthopedic injuries.
From Saturday, January 23 through Wednesday, January 27, Thralls’ team saw much of the devastation that flashed across television screens around the world.
“There was a lot of destruction,” he said. “We didn’t go down by the government palace, which is where I was told the dead bodies were, but we saw the Caribbean Market (which was destroyed) and many of the streets and things that the TV was showing.”
Site-seeing was not really on the agenda, though, as the team went through line of patients everyday, providing care and advice to people from the surrounding encampments and some who walked from five to ten miles away.
The hardest parts, Thralls said, were the patients who couldn’t achieve complete recovery with the team’s limited time and equipment.
“It’s certainly a triage situation to work with what we had and where we were at with things,” Thralls said. “Overall, I’d say the mission could be summarized as patience and perseverance.”
Thralls, a Wishard paramedic, led a medical mission team to Port-au-Prince less than two weeks after one of the most catastrophic natural disasters in modern history.
His team arrived in the Caribbean nation, which shares an island with the Dominican Republic, twelve days after a 7.0-magnitude shook much of the capital to rubble and killed an estimated at 150,000, a number that rises with each passing day. More than one million people are believed to be displaced.
Thralls, along with his wife, Melanie, led a team of medical professionals to deliver desperately needed supplies and care to the people of Haiti over the course of five days there.
“We felt it was a very successful mission,” Thralls said. “When you look at it, in 18 days we went from a disaster, with no plans, to a complete mission, equipped, departed, fulfilled and returned safely – and then drove through a 200-year snowstorm to get home.”
The team set up a clinic at the Morning Star Christian Academy, where the team provided care for 800-1,000 people and helped many more with the supplies, food and water left behind. Beyond providing care directly, the team also taught Haitian teachers and patients at the school how to scrub and bandage wounds, how to identify which medications worked best for pain control, which antibiotics to use, and how to cast and splint orthopedic injuries.
From Saturday, January 23 through Wednesday, January 27, Thralls’ team saw much of the devastation that flashed across television screens around the world.
“There was a lot of destruction,” he said. “We didn’t go down by the government palace, which is where I was told the dead bodies were, but we saw the Caribbean Market (which was destroyed) and many of the streets and things that the TV was showing.”
Site-seeing was not really on the agenda, though, as the team went through line of patients everyday, providing care and advice to people from the surrounding encampments and some who walked from five to ten miles away.
The hardest parts, Thralls said, were the patients who couldn’t achieve complete recovery with the team’s limited time and equipment.
“It’s certainly a triage situation to work with what we had and where we were at with things,” Thralls said. “Overall, I’d say the mission could be summarized as patience and perseverance.”
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