On the Bataan in Haiti, need arrives in waves

ABOARD THE BATAAN

The first three patients came in by helicopter Tuesday night. The severely dehydrated baby boy named Wilson would almost certainly bounce back, but the young woman with the cracked pelvis had too many complications. No one knew what to make of the 69-year-old grandmother who'd lasted a week without water under the ruins of a collapsed church, so they simply called her a miracle.

By the next afternoon there were 19 more - so many that Navy doctors aboard the Norfolk-based Bataan began pulling from their own drawers to make sure all the patients had fresh clothes.

"Half of them in here are wearing something of mine," said Charlena Beebe, a hospital corpsman from Yorktown. "You do what you have to."

When the Bataan left Norfolk Naval Station for Haiti eight days ago, its doctors and corpsmen knew they'd be treating casualties of last week's earthquake. But they weren't expecting so many so fast.

The first patients were brought aboard the day after the Bataan arrived off Haiti's coast. When the nearby Navy hospital ship Comfort became overwhelmed with victims following Wednesday's magnitude-5.9 aftershock, the evacuation helicopters were diverted here.

For the first time in recent years, the Bataan sounded its mass-casualty alarm Wednesday afternoon, signaling all medical personnel to rush to the ship's hospital. A group of about 80 doctors, nurses and corpsmen - sent to boost the Bataan's own staff - had come aboard less than an hour earlier.

"They had no time to get to know their working environment. Everybody had to scramble," said Cmdr. Melanie Merrick, the Bataan's top doctor.

By that night, two patients had undergone surgery and all of them had been stabilized - just in time for the two dozen new casualties who arrived Thursday.

Nine-year-old Robinson Louis-jeune, whose shoulder was hurt when a block of wall crashed down on him, was brought aboard alone. He spent most of the afternoon of his arrival cross-legged on his bed hunched over a coloring book with one arm in a sling.

"I like it here," he said later, chewing on a Snickers bar and watching a Bugs Bunny cartoon on DVD. "I'm not afraid. It's good here."

Among the Bataan's oldest patients is Ena Zizi, a 69-year-old grandmother of 15 who spent a week buried under the rubble of a collapsed church in Port-au-Prince. A Mexican K-9 search-and-rescue team pulled her from the wreckage Tuesday.

Her son, Josner Joseph, said he and his siblings looked for their mother for five days before giving up. "We decided it was time to cry our tears," he said in Creole, speaking through a hospital interpreter at his mother's bedside. "She had no water, so how could she be alive?"

Joseph said his mother told him she passed her days under the rubble by praying. Resting under a green Navy-issue blanket in the Bataan's patient ward, Zizi smiled at a corpsman checking her vitals. She suffered a broken hip and arrived severely dehydrated, but doctors said she's expected to recover.

They said she'll undergo surgery to repair the break and will almost certainly walk again.

"I see her and I think she's a miracle," said Marine Sgt. Johnny Felix, a native of Haiti who deployed with the Bataan to work as a hospital interpreter. "I see her and I think, 'This is why we came here.' "

Doctors said most of the patients have broken bones and infected wounds. Selma Rumohr, a hospital corpsman assigned to the Bataan, said many seem scared when they arrive.

"At first they just look up at you like they're thinking, 'What in the world is going on?' " Rumohr said. "But it goes away real fast. They see that you're trying to help, and they get it."

In addition to a 14-bed intensive care unit and a 46-bed patient ward, the Bataan keeps a triage area, a full pharmacy and four operating rooms. With the new personnel who just arrived, the ship's medical crew includes seven surgeons, eight physicians and more than 150 support staff. Merrick, who has been a Navy doctor for 17 years, said that's enough to continue taking on dozens of patients at a time.

She's already begun making plans to send her own triage team to land to ensure that the most critical casualties are given priority; a few Haitians have been flown to the Bataan unnecessarily, she said.

The hospital is making up for shortages of some supplies, such as patient gowns, with contributions from the Bataan's crew. Announcements broadcast over loudspeakers throughout the ship have asked sailors and Marines to donate clothes, shampoo, deodorant and slippers.

One crew member brought down several bags of candy for kids in the ward Wednesday night. "OK, we'll take it," a corpsman told him. "But hide it for now. They've already had too much sweets tonight."

On a bed nearby, a nurse sat rocking a severely disfigured 2-year-old boy. In the chaos on the ground he'd been separated from his mother, who was taken for treatment to the Comfort. "Shhh," the nurse whispered. "You're OK."

Doctors who examined the boy couldn't find any broken bones or wounds. They said they assumed he was born disfigured and that he was flown to the Bataan because the triage team in Haiti mistook his condition for an injury.

Across the room, corpsman Rumohr pulled out a plastic tub filled with children's books and presented them to 10-year-old Stephanie Silenceux, perhaps the ward's most social patient.

As she flipped through a colorful pop-up book, Stephanie exclaimed, "Magique!"

"She thinks it's magic," Rumohr said.

Stephanie scowled but waited quietly when another corpsman interrupted to ask Rumohr whether he could give ice chips to a patient who was about to have surgery.

Then she stashed the book under her arm, took Rumohr's hand and motioned toward her bed. "She wants me to sit and read with her," Rumohr said.

She looked down at the little girl. "OK, let's go."

Corinne Reilly, (757) 446-2949, corinne.reilly@pilotonline.com