basric | (no subject)

I still don't like first person and did not enjoy writing in it so back to third. This time we go outside the hospital setting.A TRUE HORROR STORY NOT OF YOUR WORLD. This is a true story so [adult content} not for the weak stomached.

Rene had been a trauma nurse for years. She joined the United States Trauma Unit after five years and due to her dedication, efficiency, and work ethic she was promoted to the First Unit the elite of three trauma teams. She was there for 9/11. She never spoke of that time. Then there was New Orleans. She'd been all over the world sent after tsunamis, mudslides, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, all sorts of natural disasters.

She worked in Nashville at the trauma center at Vanderbilt Medical Center and they worked with her when she was called away to some disaster. She kept an ear open for worldly disasters so when she heard of the Haitian quake she waited for the call. After two days she called them...team two and three had been dispatched since one had taken the last mudslide in Mexico. She relaxed.

Then Dr. McNamara with Doctors Without Borders called her. His P.A. (physician's assistant) refused to go with him to Haiti and asked her to go in her stead. She had stood in with him before. She did not want to go but she owed Dr Mac a great debt and the man was a GOD when it came to ortho-surgery. She talked with Vanderbilt and the boss at Trauma One and received permission. So much to her family's distress she agreed to go. Her mom cried until the day she left for Texas.

She sat with the other doctors and nurses and medical staff for two weeks in Texas while whoever ran the airport in Haiti got their act together. When they finally were given the go ahead, everything moved quickly. The first thing that was obvious was the huge wooden pallets piled high with food supplies, water and clothing, lining the outer edge of the runway. It sat because of a snafu with the crooked president of the country wanting his piece of the action. Money and supplies coming in, he wanted a cut to allow the remainder to be spent on the people. She noticed later none of these negotiations with him made the news.

They sat up tents for sleeping. Each nurse was assigned a marine to insure their safety. He never was far away. Sleeping on a cot six feet away separated by mosquito netting. Engineers moved quickly in one day building latrines and showers. Day three the folded walls and ceilings of the buildings arrived and were up and ready for use day four.

Surgeries began immediately. Gangrene the enemy. The area stank with the disease. The only solution was amputation. These they averaged around a hundred during an eighteen hour shift. Dr. Mac used his scalpel and the bone saw cutting above the deadly disease and leaving a flap of cleaned skin. Rene's job was closer. While he moved to the next patient she attached the flap, wrapped it and wrote orders for the nurses that would be changing the dressing and all orders from diet to I.V.F. (fluids) and antibiotic he had already signed off on. (A sign of trust).

It seemed the disease flourished. Even the smallest cut after weeks of no care, erupted into a massive sore, filled with gangrene. No one was spared, men, women, children, and infants. A mask was essential. Rene at first slighted by the 'regular' P.A.'s suddenly became very popular when she shared her stash of peppermint, spearmint and wintergreen drops. One drop in a mask blocked even the gangrene odor. But for Rene the worst part wasn't the heat, the aftershocks or the long hours of the job...it was the bugs.

Tiny...large they all wanted to fly up your nose, in your mouth, your ears. So her hair pulled up in a pony tail a wide head band covering her ears and a mask and goggles became part of her uniform. And some of them bit. She was given a spray from the military but she was hesitant to use it. After that first eighteen hours she didn't care what was in it. It kept the little monsters off your skin.

One day she woke early and she and Nick (her guard) went walking through the city. All the buildings had collapsed. The dead lined the streets. When pulled from the rubble they were piled and waited for the huge dump trucks to come and collect them. She'd always thought gangrene the worst stench she'd ever encountered, but the smell of the rotting dead permeated her clothes, her hair, worming its way through her mask. Something she'd never forget the stench of decaying human flesh in the ninety degree sun--they returned to camp, the outing leaving her shaken. She was usually a rock. The rock had cracked.

"I told you not to go. It serves no purpose. Your job is hard enough."

But she had the need to know, to see for herself.

She went to work and it was still busy, never letting up...the heat, the bugs, the aftershocks, the wounded that never stopped coming...cartload after cartload. That night a very pregnant woman, barely alive was brought in. Her left leg oozed with the disease. Her contractions were strong and the OB/GYN doctor they sent for barely arrived before she delivered the stillborn child.

Dr. Mac cut above the wound, and then had to move to her hip joint. There he closed the cut and shook his head. The disease had progressed too far. Her heart gave out thirty minutes later. Rene was shocked when orderlies took the now swaddled dead child and wrapped his mother's arms about him and duct taped them together with nearly a whole roll of tape. They then took them out to the 'dumpster of the dead' and gently lay her there among the other dead and the diseased amputated limbs.

A wave of nausea roiled over her but she had no time to be ill. After twelve hours on her feet she exchanged another pair of bloody gloves when Sister Mary, one of the many volunteer Catholic nurses, came in and asked if there was anyone there who would go with her to the mass graves. Most avoided her eyes but Rene looked over at the sixty year old woman and couldn't find it in herself to refuse. She caught Nick's eyes and he gave her a look and made a short negative move of his head. Sister Mary then said, "Please". Rene looked at Dr. Mac who knew her so well and he made a flat handed gesture...another no. But Rene looked at the woman and told her she would go. Dr. Mac sighed and Nick grunted.

That morning after eighteen hours on her feet she met the Sister outside. Nick pulled up in a jeep which pleased the Sister. She had expected to walk. Nick took Rene to the side and offered to go with the Sister, "This is not something you need to do."

She pulled away and climbed into the back. They rode in silence arriving at the two huge mounded grave sites. Rene paused beside one but the Sister continued to walk until she stood to the side of an obscenely scraped hole in the earth. In the distance she heard the rumble of the giant dump trunks. She knew what was coming but was unable to move; unable to tear her eyes from the giant beast backing up to the pit. Gears crashed and whined as the front of the truck bed began to rise. And then what once were human beings, now just shells along with remains of diseased limbs began a descent to reach their final resting place looking like pick-up-sticks.

Sister Mary was on her knees her Rosary in her hands, eyes closed, praying. Rene was the moth hypnotized by the flame unable to flee as the slap, slap, splat of human flesh colliding with human flesh reverberated through the air. The stench of the dead rose up to battle with the deadly fragrance of gangrene. A second truck replaced the first and once empty of its cargo Rene spotted the woman/child wrapped with tape. It almost took her down but she grasped Nick's hand for strength. She watched the men toss lime several inches deep over the bodies.

"That's for the smells," Nick provided.

The earthmover pushed dirt over the bodies; it covered up the grotesque actions of a president. "Too bad a marble slab in his palace didn't take him to hell," she mumbled. She saw the new Cardinal and a Methodist minister praying over the dead. Then she knew why he survived. Haiti was Hell.

Something shifted inside her and another piece of her soul ripped...did she have a soul she wondered. Her constant wavering battle over God pointed like a scale to the negative. Her heart physically ached. Nick released her hand and she floundered for a moment then he was back with Sister Mary, an arm around each and returned them back to camp.

Later that night after she showered and ate a meal without taste; she lay in bed staring into the pitch of pre-dawn. A voice came from six feet away, "I told you, you didn't need to see that."

"How did you know?"

"I've been to countries in the aftermath of their wars where the purpose was genocide. Dictators have a thing for mass graves. It’s not a pretty site; you didn't need to carry that with you.

But she was very good at taking a photograph in her mind of an event folding it up and filing it a way. This drawer in her mind she double padlocked.

She finished her three weeks and when Dr. Mac signed for another three she agreed to stay. Once that was over she came home to her family, after a debriefing session in Texas.

She put it away, like 9/11, like New Orleans but friends, family and people she worked with all had the same question, "What was the worst part of being in Port-au-Prince, Haiti."

Every single time she was caught off guard and for a moment the questioner saw ghosts in her eyes. She would close them and inside where the photo had flown out and opened with all its horror, she carefully folded it back and locked it away, opened her eyes and said, "BUGS. The bugs were a bitch."

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solstice-singer.livejournal.com

I got goosebumps reading this. I can't imagine what it must have been like to actually be there. Such tragedies to be witnessed! You paint very vivid word pictures.

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