Providing healthcare in Haiti is nothing like in the United States. Resources are limited. I frequently didn't have the medications, diagnostic tests, or supplies that I wished I had, things it's easy to take for granted at home. Project Medishare has the only NICU and PICU in all of Haiti. One day in 30 minutes we literally had three premature babies just show up in our already over capacity Pediatric ward. All of them were struggling and in respiratory distress. There is literally nowhere else to send these babies, so turning them away would have been a death sentence. We shuffled around the patients that we could and squeezed in our newest little patients. It's times like this where we would have to decide how to use the few monitors we had to best serve our patients. I decided it was better to take one of our few pulse ox monitors off the baby with the congenital heart defect and to put it on our new 30 weeker. We knew that the cardiac baby had problems that we ultimately wouldn't be able to fix in Haiti. But if the preemie had an apnea/bradycardia episode that we could fix. With our resources limited, we put the monitor on that baby instead and left a baby with a cardiac defect in her crib with no monitoring. The simplest things, that we just take for granted here...
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| Michele, one of our preemies, with her mom |
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| Haiti's only PICU/NICU |
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| Baby Christopher-we had to move him out of his incubator to make room for a smaller preemie | | | |
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Speechless.
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