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Outside hospital, a father's plea for injured daughter: 'She's dying'

E-mail|Link|Comments () January 15, 2010 12:27 PM

Bill Greene/Globe Staff

A husband consoles his wife while waiting for medical care outside Trinity Surgical Hospital in the Haitian capital.

By Maria Sacchetti, Globe Staff

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- The injured just kept arriving today, on gurneys, in trucks, and on slabs of plywood. Dozens waited outside Trinity Surgical Hospital on the garbage-strewn street, shielding themselves from the searing heat with tarps.

Ritha Carelus, 14, lay on the street, bloodied and weak. Her father, Elinord, had pulled 16 people out of the rubble of a collapsed high school -- six living and 10 dead -- as he clawed through bricks and mortar toward the sound of his daughter's voice. It seemed a miracle when he finally found her alive after Tuesday's earthquake.

Today, Carelus grew fearful that his daughter, an honor-roll student, would be left to die. She was growing weaker and appeared to have an infection in her left leg, where the bone protruded through the skin.

"She's dying," he shouted toward the hospital staff behind the driveway gate. "Nobody's helping her."

(Globe File Photo) Globe reporter Maria Sacchetti

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A few feet away, a dead boy lay covered in flies. Behind him a dead man lay barefoot, sprawled on his stomach under a wooden board.

The scene at the surgical center, in the Delmas neighborhood, reflects a medical system in Haiti that is in dire need of aid, hospital buildings damaged, destroyed, and badly understaffed. Even before the quake, the country's health care system barely functioned.

As hundreds of medical specialists, including teams from Massachusetts General Hospital and other organizations, head to Haiti, doctors here are forced to make do for now.

Trinity Surgical Hospital, run by Doctors Without Borders, had collapsed from three floors to two, and the operating room was visible through a downed wall. Doctors and nurses had set up a makeshift clinic across the street in a private house, with the waiting room in the driveway.

"I think the world knows we need help," said one hospital staff member.

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Click here to read Maria Sacchetti's previous story on the destruction in Haiti.