* * * We are proud of our Volunteers * * *

On Friday, Jan 15, I received a text from Dave Johnson, Vancouver Tower.  You may know Dave from the Rules Committee and as the co-chair of the Vancouver 2008 tournament.  Dave told me he and five other volunteers from the Canadian Medical Assistance Teams were on their way to Haiti as an advanced team for their organization and needed help to charter a plane out of Miami.  (Dave's wife Donna, an orthopedic surgeon and ice hockey player, also flew to Haiti with the main CMAT group.)  I called some of our hockey pals in Florida; Tony Llabres, Dan Neubecker, Mike Vitti, and a non-hockey buddy of mine, Keith Bernard, to get the ball rolling.  Long story short, these guys got on it and Dave ended up with a Lear 55 they found...the only thing they couldn't do was get a release time that day (and it wasn't from lack of trying).  The MIA guys also helped in another big way as you'll see in the stories below.  I'm not surprised and I'm very proud of our group, air traffic

controllers and ice hockey players!  Yeah, we're loud, obnoxious, and sometimes a bit drunk and smelly, but we usually come through when needed.  Read the entire account below:

Andy McGowan

From Dave, Jan 28:

Hello to All

This e-mail comes to you high in the sky. Yes we are on our way home onboard a Canadian Forces C17 (big 4 engine jet transport plane).

I had wanted to write so many times since my last but my days were long, incredibly long and there just wasn’t the time to write. On average I have had about 2 hours sleep each night for the past 14 nights. However I now have a few hours on board an aircraft where there is no in-flight service, in fact some passengers are just lying on the floor as there are no seats.

Where did I leave off, let’s see; Well I last wrote a week and a half ago on Monday and now 11 days have passed...it would be impossible to chronicle all 11 days without writing a book so in brief.

After my 4 days conducting Search and Rescue in Port-Au-Prince I took one member of my medical team and went on a reconnaissance mission to outlying areas to find a location where my entire team who arrived just the night before would set-up our large field/mobile hospital. We decided on a town called Leogane a city of 130,000 who until the moment we arrived had not seen a single aid group since the earthquake. Now that I am safely returning I can tell you that got quite dicey upon our arrival! We were traveling with a driver in a private vehicle and a press crew of two (it was hard to go anywhere without numerous requests from press to travel/embed with us). When we arrived and got out of the vehicle to have a look at a field a large mob of people encircled our vehicle, the camera crew, and my teammate. I was on the outside of the mob and determined this wasn’t a good situation and had to push my way back to the car get everyone inside and just back the car away with people banging on the car and screaming and yelling. They were understandably upset that it had taken so long for help to arrive and we were just the first people they could express that to. Undaunted by this, strangely enough, I decided that this field was a great location for our field hospital and we returned the next day in force and constructed our unit there without incident.

We have spent the last 9 days at this hospital seeing on average 250 patients a day. It has been quite overwhelming for our team of 16. Donna performed 10-12 surgeries a day amputating dozens of limbs. We had 3 babies born at our hospital in those 9 days including one where we almost lost both mother and child due to complications but in the end both survived. There are many heart breaking stories but the great thing is that we did treat/help over 2000 patients in just 9 days! It is so strange, Donna would drill rods, screws in broken legs too many to count and 15 minutes after the operation we would be placing the patient on a motorcycle with 1-2 sometimes three other persons on the same bike so that they could go home by their only means available. We couldn’t hold on to patients over night so no matter how serious the surgery was, they would be heading home (a tent) within minutes. They are incredibly resilient people.

The deployment was incredible for me and my organization partly because we worked so close with and had an incredible amount of support from the military. Normally we go off and do our own thing but somehow I fluked into a great relationship with a Lieutenant Colonel and it just grew. Within a day of our hospital’s operation we had 50 sailors join us each day off the Athabaska from 0800-1600hrs. They gave me total rein to put them hard to work with anything we needed which enabled us to focus more on the Haitian people. We were visited by three different Generals, the Canadian Ambassador to Haiti and all kinds of other dignitaries. In the end there were 6 other field hospitals in the area but all who visited said the Canadians were the most organized and professional operation in all of Haiti.

At the end of each day section of Vandoo’s (Canada’s most elite soldiers) would relieve the Navy and be our security for the evening. Again now that we are safely returning I can tell you the reason for the Vandoo’s. Our first evening of operation the Navy was with us until 4pm when they had to return to their ship. The Colonel had promised me he would have some army guys provide security for the night or he would return himself to camp with us. At 6pm dusk fell upon us and no Army in sight. Then right next to us about 200 meters away a large crowd formed at the edge of our field and became very angry over the lack of food distribution. The crowd turned to a riot, it was very loud and despite my (blind faith) assurances to my team we would be OK the riot got worse. Over the next 2 hours I made four or five Satellite phone calls back to the Athabaska requesting assistance. They were of course in no position to help even though I reported that there were shots fired and one of my members had been hit by the downward fall of pellets from a shotgun blast into the air. At 2100hrs I sent one member of my team in a private vehicle to a United Nations base just 3 kms away to get assistance and after another slightly tense hour the UN cavalry arrived with huge armoured troop carriers and lots of firepower. They quickly secured the area and parked 100 feet from our tents. With the excitement over we went to sleep and awoke the next morning with the UN gone and the Canadian Army in its place. Apparently I had slept through the entire transfer of security handover. Needless to say not another moment was ever spent without 20-30 armed to the teeth guards all around our compound.

A lot of my time during the past week has been spent doing PR, dealing with the press and unbelievable as it is, passing out requests (kinda orders) to all the different levels of military that have been helping us. While doing all of that I would be consulting with medical staff and directing what bed or stretcher patients should go to. I speak with visiting doctors from all over the world each day just trying to keep up with the medical lingo like I am some type of doctor myself but we all know that’s the furthest thing from reality! Yesterday I had three different interviews where I walked 10 feet left to the next camera for the next interview and so on and so on. The media is everywhere and sometimes I find I must escort them off the compound when they have overstayed their welcome.

We had to medivac a few patients out during the 9 days which I take care of all of the arrangements when this occurs. We had a very emotional day this past Tuesday when we had to medivac out one of our team members to the Athabasca for failing health. It was our friend Kate who is an anaesthetist and Donna and I had asked her to join us in Haiti. After 2 days on the ship she was flown back this morning to our compound in time for five of us to get on a SAR Griffon helicopter for the ride from Leogane to Porto-au-Prince for our flight home. What an incredible ride, I got to hang out over the edge of the helicopter as it had no doors and cruised a couple of hundred feet above the ground. It was a great rush.

I wanted to thanks those that have helped us along during this deployment. Some great friends came together to help me find jets to charter out of Miami when we needed it and those that jumped to help load and coordinate the delivery of an X-ray machine. On Monday I made a frantic plea for help to load an airplane near Vancouver with an X-Ray machine we needed desperately in Leogane as there wasn’t one in the entire city and through everyone’s help and again military helicopters moving it once it arrived in Haiti we saw it arrive Wednesday eve at our hospital. Outstanding and thanks to everyone.

It was a great experience and as always we are really, glad and fortunate to have participated in a worthwhile project but we are really looking forward to home once again.

We are now heading to Montreal where Donna and I have decided to spend a couple of days to regroup and recover. We plan to be back Sunday afternoon in time for work Monday and look forward to seeing some comforting faces.

Our best to all,

Dave and Donna

You can see more updates & pics at www.canadianmedicalteams.org.

From Miami Center, Jan 20:  

From Donna, Jan 20:

From Dave, Jan 15/16: