Team Sinai Haiti Returns Home

Team Sinai Haiti has returned home, safe and sound and have started to post more of their experiences on their blog.  Although they had intended to post daily, the team found themselves to be utterly exhausted by the end of the long days and came to the realization that they would have to post in a non-contemporaneous fashion upon returning home.The following is sample story written by co team leader John Herzenberg.

John, desperate for food, fell from the mango tree he was climbing sustaining a devastating and irreversible spinal cord injury when his 12^th thoracic vertebra dislocated one inch away from his 1^st lumbar vertebra. He stoically accepted his fate, though one point indicated he would prefer to be dead. There is not much that can be done, other than to repair the bone injury with rods and screws, allowing the patient to sit in a wheel chair. We heard that there is a spinal cord rehabilitation unit somewhere in Haiti, so there is hope for John after all. Haiti is tough enough with an intact spinal cord. As a paraplegic, you are really in big trouble in Haiti.  Scott Nelson, our host, is an accomplished spinal surgeon, and he deftly reduced the fracture dislocation, and rodded the spine with modern state of the art pedicle screw instrumentation, allowing John to be sitting up the very next day. The surgery came none too soon, as when we turned John to position him face down for the surgery, he had already started to develop pressure sores on his back from laying on the narrow canvas army cot.

The surgery had been put off in favor of more urgent procedures, but finally, after waiting for two days, we put him on the schedule yet again, even though it meant starting the case at 9 pm and finishing at midnight (with one more to follow...) To my knowledge, Adventist Hospital is the only facility in PAP set up to operate on spinal fractures. Scott has really built up an incredibly versatile orthopedic unit here.