LES CAYES, Haiti (AP) – Orderlies pushed Jertha Ylet’s bed from the center of the hospital ward to one side so Dr. Michelet Paurus could plug in his chainsaw. He was silent when the doctor cut his plaster in measured strokes.
He should leave the hospital today, the doctor said.
Ylet had resisted until the cast came out. She had been at Les Cayes General Hospital since she was taken there on August 14, unconscious and with her leg crushed, after a 7.2-magnitude earthquake destroyed her house, killing her father and others. two relatives and seriously injuring his brother. There is no home to return to.
A surgeon inserted a metal rod into his lower left leg on Thursday. Ylet, 25, had not gotten out of bed, much less tried to walk since he arrived. Her 5-year-old daughter, Younaika, who was not injured, shared the bed and spent her days playing with other children in the neighborhood.
More than a week after the earthquake on the southwestern peninsula of Haiti, at least 2,207 people died, 12,268 were injured and nearly 53,000 homes destroyed, Ylet poses an emerging dilemma for the region’s limited health services: how to deliver hospital beds when discharged patients have nowhere to go.
“I told the doctor, ‘I have nowhere to go,'” Ylet said. “I told them everything. The doctor doesn’t understand.”
In the first days after the earthquake, the hospital overflowed with patients. The wounded were lying in courtyards and driveways waiting to be cared for. Now there are still people in these areas, but they are patients with discharge or people who were never admitted, who have been attracted by the donations of food, water and clothes that arrive at the hospital daily.
“We have a lot of patients who have been discharged, but they still stay in the yard,” said hospital director Peterson Gede. “Knowing they will receive food and water … they have no intention of leaving.”
On Monday, Gede issued an order for hospital staff to begin “motivating” patients to leave, “to make them understand that we need beds for new patient admissions.”
It turned out to be easier said than done. Not having a home to return to was a major hurdle for Ylet and many others.
Ylet lost consciousness when a wall of her stone block house in Camp-Perrin fell on top of her when the earthquake occurred.
Her boyfriend, Junior Milord, had left 20 minutes earlier for work. He froze on the street until the shock stopped, and ran back to Ylet’s house. He found her buried near the front of the building, which unlike the back, had not collapsed completely.
“I thought I was dead when I started pulling out the blocks,” Milord said.
He pulled her out and pointed to a passing car, which took her to Les Cayes Hospital. “When I woke up I was in the hospital,” he said.
Milord then returned to help dig up the bodies of Ylet’s father, cousin, and brother-in-law. Their bodies are still in a funeral home because the family has no money to bury them. Milord lost his own home, in addition to two uncles, an aunt and a brother in the earthquake.
Milord said some of Ylet’s surviving relatives are camping in his garden. If Ylet and her daughter have to leave, he said, they will end up there too.
Throughout the room, nurse Gabrielle Lagrenade understands this reality as well as anyone else.
Lagrenade and her 21-year-old daughter, Bethsabelle, have been sleeping outside since the quake. They struggle to sleep on the side of the gravel road with their head less than 6 meters from the road. All night, mopeds, SUVs and tractor trailers rain dust and pebbles.
It is the only flat land around the two-story building where they had rented an apartment on top of a small clothing store. The ground falls hurriedly from the road to a stream running behind the building, which was built on reinforced concrete columns over a drainage ravine that feeds into the stream. Now two columns show open spaces between the bottom of the building and the top of the supports. The owner has prudently decided to demolish it.
Despite her own precarious situation, Lagrenade, 52, continues to arrive at the hospital every day in turn, carefully folding and storing her bedding, slipping discreetly behind the row of buildings on the road for bathing. and resurrecting the clothes of her impeccable white nurse. a motorbike taxi to go to work.
Ylet is in his room. About 22 beds spread across the room. Nurses and doctors wear masks, but patients do not, although virtually no one in Haiti has been vaccinated against COVID-19. The nurses huddle around a wooden table at one end. Medical waste is thrown in a cardboard box in a corner.
Lagrenade is not unsupportive of Ylet’s situation and that of other recently homeless patients, but she is pragmatic.
Beds are needed, he said.
“After someone gets well, you have to go,” Lagrenade said.
This is what Paurus was trying to explain to Ylet.
An orthopedic doctor who came from Port-al-Príncipe to operate on his leg had allowed him to leave, according to the doctor.
“If we decide to keep patients whose homes have been destroyed, there will be no room for (new) patients,” he said. “We have a lot of patients and emergencies who need a bed.”
Then Paurus got his saw.
After her delivery was turned off, Ylet said she would give up her bed but camp outside the hospital grounds because she was told she would return Thursday for a follow-up appointment.
But then some volunteers brought hot lunches. At the end of the day, Ylet was still in bed. My lord said no one had told him to leave again, so there he was.
“The doctor has to understand that I have nowhere to go and I’m not leaving,” Ylet said. “I’ll stay in the hospital yard and sleep in it until I can figure it out.”