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Santa Rosa health experts treating Haiti earthquake victims
A Sailor aboard the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, comforts a young Haitian boy after the ship's medical staff performed life-saving surgery. Carl Vinson and Carrier Air Wing 17 are conducting humanitarian and disaster relief operations near Port-au-Prince.
U.S. Navy photoPublished: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 2:24 p.m.
Last Modified: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 2:24 p.m.
Haitian children who lost arms or legs in the devastating earthquake are still coming aboard the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, where a former Santa Rosa man is directing emergency medical care at a fully staffed 50-bed hospital.
“Every day here there are more requests for care,” said Navy Cmdr. Al Shwayhat, 43, a physician who grew up in Santa Rosa and graduated from Cardinal Newman High School in 1984.
“It's such an overwhelming situation, there are so many people hurt,” Shwayhat said in a telephone interview Tuesday from the 95,000-ton carrier, which arrived off Port-au-Prince three days after the Jan. 12 quake.
Among the relief workers on the island are Dr. Josh Weil, chief of the emergency department at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Santa Rosa, and Chloe Gans-Rugebregt, a Haiti-based Red Cross delegate from Santa Rosa.
Weil is with a team from Relief International, a nonprofit organization, which has set up a field clinic in Carrefour, a poor community in the Port-au-Prince area.
Weil, 45, personally saw 68 patients on Monday at a mobile clinic, many of them “walking wounded” with broken bones and infected cuts, said his wife, Claire Mollard, a Santa Rosa veterinarian.
Many injuries are not serious, but an infected wound — which is common — “becomes limb/life threatening” if it goes untreated, he said.
Weil, who joined Kaiser's Santa Rosa staff in 1998, previously volunteered in Sri Lanka after the December, 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and in Baton Rouge, La. after Hurricane Katrina in August, 2005.
“He's an amazing person,” said Bob Schultz, medical director of Kaiser facilities in Sonoma County.
Weil, a triathlete, and his wife have three children and two dogs at home in Santa Rosa. Weil seems to have befriended a dog that was hanging around the clinic, prompting Mollard's speculation that he might bring it back with him.
“I wouldn't be surprised,” she said.
The Vinson, a nuclear powered carrier, steamed straight to Haiti from Newport News, Va., and was the first U.S. Navy ship — and first to bring an operating room — to Haiti on Jan. 15.
The 1,000-bed hospital ship USNS Comfort arrived on Jan. 20, and the two are now working in tandem. Officials on the Comfort estimated Tuesday that there are 75,000 injured or ill people on the island, Shwayhat said. The death toll is estimated at 200,000, the Associated Press said.
Most of the people treated aboard the Vinson in the first few days had open fractures, with the bone exposed, most of them infected and some with gangrene, Shwayhat said. The injuries are consistent with large objects falling on people, aggravated by delayed medical care, he said.
Many casualties came by helicopter straight from the island, with no prior treatment, he said. Now, more patients require urgent care, rather than emergency care, but their injuries are still serious.
A 16-year-old Haitian boy who was pulled from his collapsed home and lost both legs was in the Vinson's hospital Tuesday. He was stabilized, Shwayhat said, and officials are trying to locate his family.
The most seriously injured patients are sent by helicopter to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base hospital, which has orthopedic surgeons, he said.
“Absolutely, it's rewarding,” Shwayhat said of his shipboard work. “Fulfilling first; exhausting second.”
Shwayhat moved to Santa Rosa with his family in 1972, attending St. Rose Elementary School and Cardinal Newman, where he played football, basketball, track and cross-country running.
His parents, Francis and Grace Shwayhat, who are immigrants from Jordan, still live in Santa Rosa. The Navy doctor's wife and two children live in San Diego.
Shwayhat served aboard the Comfort on a humanitarian mission to South America in 2007, helping treat 100,000 patients in 12 nations, and he accompanied Marines on a relief mission to East Timor, an Indonesian island, in 1999.
Gans—Rugebregt, 32, is one of three American Red Cross delegates based in Port-au-Prince, where their office was destroyed by the quake.
“We have been providing relief since day one to a population of around 15,000 people that have set up makeshift camps around our office and in the mountains behind,” she said in an e-mail.
The Red Cross has sent out five mobile health clinics and provided emergency transportation to a hospital, Gans-Rugebregt said. The agency is also working with partners to supply food, water, sanitation and supplies to the camps.
“The situation has been improving daily, but it is still very difficult to provide aid to the 2 million-plus people who are homeless and lost everything,” she said.
Gans-Rugebregt grew up in the town of Mendocino, earned a bachelor's degree at UC Santa Cruz and a master's degree in public health at UCLA.
Her parents, Maria Carrillo High School teachers John Rugebregt and Claudine Gans-Rugebregt, waited four anxious hours after the quake hit on Jan. 12 before hearing from their daughter.
“We're kind of glued to Skype,” Claudine Gans-Rugebregt said, referring to the Internet voice program, their only link to Chloe. “We come home, turn on the computer and wait for her to come on.”
“Despite being being busy and exhausted, the feeling is different, I think, than being in a hospital,” Weil said in an e-mail to colleagues at Kaiser. “It's not exactly what I expected, but it's been an intense experience.”
Overall, the Carrefour clinic is treating up to 250 patients a day, Mollard said.
The clinicians have a fairly sturdy house available, but they are sleeping outside owing to the repeated aftershocks.
“It's easier than having to run outside a few times a night,” Weil's e-mail said. He's getting six hours of sleep despite nightlong noise — “singing (church mass every night starts about 11 and goes until the wee hours), roosters, dogs, people snoring, occasional gunfire and who knows what else.”
The house has electricity four hours a day, toilets and cold showers, he said. There's at least one hot meal a day for the clinic staff and plenty of potable water “though I would love some ice,” Weil said.
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