SEATTLE - A second wave of local surgeons are preparing to fly out to Haiti just as some of the first responders are getting back.
A team including two orthopedic surgeons from Virginia Mason will be leaving Thursday night.
"We've committed to be there for a month and I think the needs will be ongoing for some time," said Dr. Thomas Green. "I've worked in third-world countries, but never in a disaster like this."
Green and Dr. Lyle Sorensen will be working out of St. Damien's Hospital in Port-au-Prince, Green said, which is affiliated with Friends of the Orphans. Green said he has friends at both the hospital and the aid agency and knows they lost several people in the quake, including Molly Hightower of Port Orchard, Wash., said Green.
"And when your friends need help, you help them, right?" he said.
Orthopedic surgeons are in high demand because of the sheer number of crushing injuries sustained in the Jan. 12 earthquake.
"There's a whole generation of patients that now have amputations," said Dr. Lyle Sorensen. "So not only do they need their amputations to be healed up and prepared properly, they'll eventually need prosthetics, and they're short of even things like crutches."
Meanwhile, one of the first U.S. orthopedic surgeons to respond to the earthquake is back at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.
Dr. Jim Krieg was told the day after the earthquake that he would be heading to Port-au-Prince with a 50-member International Medical Surgical Response Team, a group the U.S. federal government deploys to assist in disasters around the world, said Krieg, who had to leave his wife and three kids home in Seattle.
"If anybody ever saw the television show M*A*S*H, we have M*A*S*H tents," said Krieg, who is an orthopedic surgeon at Harborview Medical Center. "That allowed us to go out into Port-au-Prince and set up a fully functioning hospital where there had been none before."
The original plan was to set up in a soccer field outside a small college in town, Krieg said, but "by the time we deployed to the area, it was already basically a refugee camp. There were thousands of people living in makeshift tents and other shelters."
So they pitched their hospital tents in a nearby courtyard, and in five days Krieg said he treated at least a hundred patients for everything from hand fractures to severe infections requiring amputations.
"A busy day here at Harborview may entail a half dozen patients that are critical coming in all at once," he said. "Well, this was literally hundreds of patients that needed aid right away."
In addition to treating a constant stream of patients, Krieg cautions about the burning out, when doctors are "trying to do so much with so little." His chief concerns were limited access to running water and basic medical supplies, as well as a frustration over injuries made far more severe because they weren't treated soon enough.
But he added that his co-workers managed to accomplish a lot of good in the short time they were there.
"I traveled with a team of... nurse managers, people well-respected in the field, and they just rolled their sleeves up and worked as hard as I've ever seen to provide nursing care," said Krieg.
The second wave of doctors hopes to ease the burden, bringing in thousands of wraps for amputated limbs and fresh surgical kits that can be sterilized and reused. They expect to be treating infections and amputations for years to come, and have the benefit of a now-working hospital to practice their medicine.
The team leaves from Boeing field at 8 p.m. Thursday night.
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