Dr. Dick Furman, co-founder of World Medical Mission, was part of a Samaritan's Purse team that arrived in Haiti less than a week after the earthquake to help provide emergency medical treatment. He reflected on his experiences on his flight out a week later.
I don’t know how their memories will affect me as time goes on. But now it is difficult not to compare them with life as we know it. They will not sleep in their homes because of the aftershocks. At night they still cry out and moan and wail. The stench remains in the air as you drive by building that collapsed.
And then there are the patients that survived and we operated on who are in despair with nowhere to go and loved ones dead. I made my last walk through the hospital after our surgical team meeting Monday morning. I left patients I will remember for the rest of my life. I am on the plane flying home as I think back over what was the most horrific time I have ever experienced in my life. I have never seen such suffering. I have never seen so many people go through so much sorrow.
It surely looked different on TV. Watching it, you could get the feeling of what the earthquake was like. You could get a feel of the destruction of buildings and houses and stores. You could even get some insight into the terrible devastating feeling the people are going through.
But until you have examined a patient who was in the kitchen while her husband and four children were in the next room,
who felt her third floor apartment begin to shake and sway and less than 60 seconds later her family was dead and she had a slab of concrete roof lying on her legs and pelvis—until you are a part of that, you can’t really understand what it was all about.
We operated on her and for the next week, every time I examined her at her bedside, she would begin shaking her head and begin weeping. Last night, my last night in Haiti, I left our quarters and slipped down to the hospital just before going to bed and prayed at her bedside, gently placing my hand on her head.
I didn’t know how to pray, what to ask. We had done everything medically that could be done, but only God’s love for this woman could give her any comfort. Our surgery was going to be successful. The physical part of her problem would be healed but that was minimal to her overall suffering. So I prayed a verse that came to mind. I prayed that God would give her a peace that surpasses all human understanding that would guard her heart and her mind through Jesus Christ during this terrible time in her life.
I finished my prayer and stood by her bed and just looked at her hardened face and thought of what she has been through and wondered how long she would suffer before she realized the peace of God.
I walked through the other wards. Most of the patients were asleep. I could not speak Creole nor understand it. I would stop at the foot of certain beds and give a nod at a particular patient I had gotten to know in a very unusual way. They didn’t try to speak. I would stand a few minutes looking at them and ask God to give them that same peace that only He could give. I would just touch their foot or pat their leg and stand with them a moment just to let them know that even though I wouldn’t see them again here on earth, I cared.
I stopped at the first bed in the second ward. The patient had pulled his sheet up over his face. I wanted him to see me but didn’t want to awaken him even though he was one of my favorite patients. He was a large man; a policeman, in his mid thirties. We had put some metal pins through his broken bones on his right leg and then stabilized it with an external brace.
He had a wife and two young daughters. His wife was giving the girls a bath when the quake hit. He was trapped for two days, not knowing whether his wife and children were alive or not. Even when some men found him and pounded the concrete off his body to free him, he did not know. He didn’t know for sure they had died until he looked back at the rest of the house and realized the slab of roof had completely crushed the bathroom portion of his home.
He had been with us three days in the hospital but didn’t speak much to anybody. I can only imagine what keeps going through his mind. I can’t imagine how I would react if my wife and children were suddenly taken away from me.
A few beds down were the man with the little 3-year-old boy who had lost part of his arm. The man’s wife and two children had died. He kept telling me through the interpreter that his wife was 32 years old. Thirty-two, he kept saying. I remember him sitting and holding his boy all day in his lap as if he wanted to make certain he didn’t lose him. We had tried to discharge him earlier in the day but he had no money and nowhere to go. At least at the hospital they received one meal a day. We needed his bed for other patients but yet couldn’t make him leave.
I walked on to the next ward and saw another patient who touched my life. She is 9 and was at school when the quake hit around 4:30 in the afternoon. She was trapped beneath slabs of concrete and rubble. Her father, who is now asleep on the floor beside her bed, immediately went to look for her but didn’t find her.
He told me that all night long he took his flashlight and poked it into little holes in the concrete slabs stacked upon each other. He told me he would call for her but there was no answer all night. The next morning, when it was light, he still had to use his flashlight to see between the rubble.
He said he kept calling her name and kept looking for her. It was early afternoon when, he said, “She recognized my voice and began yelling for me” He came to her and saved her. It took him and his son three more days to break the steel reinforced concrete off her body.
I looked at her lying asleep with a broken pelvis and a crushed right leg that may be paralyzed. But she’s alive and her father is the proudest I’ve ever seen. I remember him immediately smiling each time I would pass her bed during the day.
I remember seeing him this afternoon. He was holding a New Testament the Billy Graham Association chaplains had given him. His index finger was stuck between some pages. I stopped and asked what the Bible was about and he immediately opened it and pointed to a verse. It was his daughter’s favorite verse, he said. He showed it to me: John 3:16. I nodded and smiled at him and then to his daughter and went on to the operating room.
Last night, I looked at the father on the bare floor, asleep. He was so proud that he saved his daughter’s life because he knows there are hundreds of students in her class who are still buried and will never be saved. I am reminded as I sit here on the plane of what Jesus said in Luke about his sheep who will recognize his voice and will follow him. I will never read that passage the same again because I will always see the girl who recognized her father’s voice and was saved.
I next stopped by a lady’s bed. We had operated on her several days ago. She had an open wound of her left leg that needed debriedment and then pinning. We were planning to put in two pins above the break and two below it to keep it from moving around.
As I stood beside her, I could see her awake and smiling up at me. And I remembered such a different look as we were rolling her into the OR. After getting the sterile drape over her leg and beginning to get the instruments ready to begin the procedure, I could hear her speaking in Creole to the anesthesiologist. When I asked what she had said, I was told that she wanted to know if we were going to take her leg off.
It was only then I realized that in all the excitement and hurriedness of the moment, we had not taken the time to track down an interpreter and explain to her what we planned to do. It was then that I realized that we as surgeons were focused on the physical problem but had completely ignored the emotional. How could we disregard such an important part of caring for these patients?
As I stood there last night and looked down at her smiling face, I remembered she was the patient who taught me that as big as I was in my own main world as a surgeon, I had failed as a physician by not taking full care of this patient. Her forgiving smile is one I will remember as the humbling factor that I will carry with me; forever remembering that I am responsible for the patient’s feeling as well as a broken bone or an injury or any sickness a patient may have. My only communication of gratitude for what she taught me was a smile and a nod as I left her bedside.
Three beds down was a 70-year-old lady who had been trapped for over 24 hours before they got her free. I could only imagine the apprehension she went through at her age. I remember having her sit on the stretcher and bend forward as the anesthesiologist stuck in the needle in her back to give her spinal anesthesia.
She kept repeating one word over and over all the while the needle was being placed and the injection given. As we laid her down, the repeated word got quieter and quieter until it was only a whisper by the time she lay flat on the operating table. I asked what word she was saying and the interpreter said, “She kept saying Jesus.”
For some reason I began to think of the end times. How much suffering and pain there will be. I wondered if certain people would begin to repeat that name over and over like this lady. And I wondered how many times she repeated it during the 24 hours she had been trapped. As I stood by her bed last night, I thought that is what I learned from her; that in times of trouble he is the first one I will turn to and call upon. And in my heart, I thanked that elderly lady for reminding me of such an important factor for my life.
I looked further down the ward and saw another lady I had come to know. She was awake. She is 40 years old and began to run as soon as she felt the house shake. Somehow, she knew it was an earthquake. She almost made it, but a portion of concrete wall caught her left leg just above her ankle and tore flesh away down to bone.
She was taken to the government hospital and placed in a plaster cast, hoping to save her leg later with an operation. But it was nine days later before she came to our hospital. We gave her a spinal block for anesthesia and placed her on the operating table to remove the packing of gauze stuffed in her wound.
It was immediately obvious her distal tibia was non-viable. We told the interpreter to ask permission to amputate her leg. The patient began to nod affirmatively whole-heartedly. There were no tears, no grimace, only the repeated nod. It was evident she had already gone through enough pain and suffering. She wanted relief at any cost, even to remove her leg.
As I stood by her bed last night I thought about the death of my older brother. He had leukemia and terrible suffering before he died. I thought of his last words to the nurse who came to examine him during the last night of his life. She told me he looked at her and said: “I am ready to go home.”
I think sometimes pain and suffering prepares our minds for the inevitable happening—whether it is dying or loosing a leg. I don’t know about this lady, but being a believer made that decision a lot more peaceful for my brother. Even though we hated to tell her on the operating table we couldn’t save her leg, I realized as I stood by her bed last night how much more peaceful she looked after we had amputated her leg. The thoughts that sometime suffering makes some decisions easier ran through my mind as I left her and looked for other patients who had taught me more lessons of life.
The mother was in the bed with the little girl when I went by. Both were asleep. The children are the worst. You just feel so bad that they have to go through something like this at their age. I can’t help but think of my grandchildren when I see the ones their age in the hospital.
I remembered the first time I saw that little girl. I was afraid she was going to loose her foot. She had only a single block fall on it but it damaged so much tissue around the open bone. Perhaps we should have amputated when we first saw it but we kept thinking there may be some way of getting the wound clean enough to swing a flap over the bone.
But as I looked at the child and her mother in the bed, I also saw the bandaged distal stump of leg where we had to come to the conclusion two days ago that there was no way to save her foot.
As I sit here in the plane, I realize we are going to have to go back in a few months with prosthesis for all the amputations that have been performed. And that will be for thousands who have had feet amputated, legs taken off below their knee, and the ones who had to have the leg removed above the knee. I remind myself there will still be a lot to be done long after the stories are off the television and nothing is printed about them in the newspaper. I know our job is not finished in Haiti.
And leaving the little girl and walking on past patients in the hall, my mind goes back to the drive I had from our hospital on the outskirts of town to the government hospital downtown.
We passed a body lying in the gutter. Someone had laid a piece of plastic over it and all you could see were the feet sticking out one end and the top of the scalp out the other.
A little further there was a single building that had fallen out over the street and covered half the road. As we passed in the only lane left open, I saw an automobile that had been crushed down to within two feet of the ground. Then I noticed a hand sticking out from under the roof of the car and immediately asked our driver to stop.
As I looked closer, I could see that the driver of the smashed car must have gotten out somehow but the body whose hand and arm I saw was that of a lady who had reached for the driver’s door and was frozen in that position with her body lying across the seat and her arm and head almost to the door.
It was as if time has stood still from the moment of the quake. I knew she had not died instantly, probably because the automobile roof had lightened the load of the slab somewhat and given her time to at least attempt to get out. But I knew it had been different for what I saw next.
Just behind the car, a bicycle wheel was protruding from under the same slab. I bent down to look under the rubble and saw the body of a man in a uniform crushed beside what was left of the bicycle. I could see his arm completely. It had not been crushed at all. The khaki short-sleeved shirt he had on with some stripes around the sleeve was all intact; but his head was crushed and his shoulders were bent completely together and I knew he had died in a moment.
I couldn’t help but think of things that happen in the twinkling of an eye. The woman in the car and the man on the bicycle were simply going down the road and in a moment, their lives were taken.
It is strange what runs through our minds when we see the unusual. Such thoughts brand themselves on our minds. As I was bent over looking under the slab at the man on the bike, I thought that we had better be prepared right now for our lives to come to an end because we don’t know if we will have a tomorrow or not.
Parts of Bible verses came to mind. I didn’t remember the exact passages that related to what I was thinking at the time but looked them up later. James 4 says, “Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is our life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” The man on the bicycle was alive one moment, and the next was gone.
1 Corinthians 15 speaks to such a time when our bodies are brought back to life: “We shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.”
In a twinkling of an eye was what flashed in my mind when I first saw the man on the bicycle. I was moved in a way I will never forget. If there are individuals who do not know the Lord, they need to come face to face with the fact that tomorrow is not guaranteed. They can make any decision they want but they must decide one way or another. And the other thought that ran through my mind: What about friends that I have that I do not know if they are believers or not. I should talk to them about the Lord sometime before tomorrow.
As I left the hospital last night, I remember the heaviness in my heart even though I don’t consider myself an emotional type person. I knew we had done our best, but there was still that feeling of inadequacy.
As I walked toward the main door out of the hospital I had to pass by the 8-10 patients who were on floor mattresses pushed to one side of the hall. These were our new over-flows that had been admitted that morning. One by taxi, one by bus, both with broken limbs.
The man on the last mattress was elderly with white curly hair. He was asleep as I stopped and looked at him. He had two broken legs and was all alone. It was 10 days after the quake and he did not know where his family was or if they were alive. And they had no knowledge of his condition or whereabouts. He knew one of them had a phone but couldn’t remember the number. I pulled the Samaritan’s Purse blanket that had been given him up around his shoulders and left the hospital.
Now, as I am flying back home, I think back. In the weeks to come, thoughts and feelings will gel in my mind but right now I am having trouble not crying and I haven’t cried since my mother died years ago. So many lives were saved, yet there were so many we never even had a chance to treat.
I try to think through the difference in our medical team from most of the rest I saw working in Haiti.
There were numerous doctors and surgeons and O.R. nurses and surgical and emergency room nurses from all over working in different parts of the city. The most impressive mobile hospital I have ever seen was the Israeli hospital. In addition to them, there were teams of doctors and nurses from many organizations. Doctors without Borders were there.
All the doctors who responded to this disaster have one goal in mind and that is to save lives. That’s why we all went. And I think we all were able to do just that. But there has to be more to it than that. There has to be more to it than to extend these people’s lives a month or a year.
My thoughts keep going back to this morning’s planning session we had for our team before we started work at the hospital. The surgery schedule and the patients to be discharged were discussed. The long-term plan for the complicated cases was brought up.
Then the chaplain’s report was given, and that is what keeps running through my mind. It was a Billy Graham Evangelical Association chaplain, who was on the ground with our medical team the third day after the quake, giving the report. From the beginning, the chaplains have prayed with and given encouragement to every patient in the hospital. He reported that every patient except one who was not a believer accepted the Lord this past week.
I wonder why we have to go through tragedies and troubles and disappointments in our lives before we get a right relationship with the Lord. I think further about all the ones who didn’t make it and think of Noah and the ark. When all who were going to be saved were aboard, the verse in Genesis reads, “And the door was shut.” No one who was not aboard would be saved.
Of the thousands who have died and so many of them still in the rubble, how many of them were not on the ark? How many of them were unsaved and all at once the door was shut? I have to wonder because I keep thinking of the ones who were taken out in the twinkling of an eye. I wish as a doctor I could have warned those to get out of their house.
Hearing that report was a great reminder why our team went. I am comforted to know that it was to do more than extend a life for a few more months or years. It was to extend lives for eternity.
I am comforted that the chaplains prayed with each patient on the wards and presented the plan of salvation to them. I am comforted to know the surgeons prayed with the patients prior to operating on them, not only for wisdom for which steps to take during a particular procedure but also as a witness to those patients that their surgeons believed in Someone greater than us to look to in times like this.
I look back after being at the hospital this morning and flying back from Haiti this afternoon and realize our hospital was like a magnet to bring those patients in and we were used as a tool for evangelism.
This experience has given me new insight in understanding the difference between the physical and the spiritual. I saw the physical bodies that were caught under concrete slabs that resulted in broken bones and tissue injuries. Those physical bodies we treated or operated on.
But the reality is that each one of those bodies we operated on will someday die and be buried. Now I understand so much more about each of those patient’s spiritual souls, which never die but will live for eternity.
I have come to a real understanding of what makes our team different. I have come to realize that we are more interested in not just helping extend a physical life for a day or a year, but to extend their soul for eternity.
Helping people is not our goal. Jesus is our goal.http://www.samaritanspurse.org/index.php/articles/dr_dick_furman_a_surgeons_reflections/
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