News

Race against death as limbs amputated

January 20, 2010 Edition 1

PORT-AU-PRINCE: For two days, Ticia Vital refused doctors' pleas to allow them to amputate her festering left leg, even as gangrene spread and the alternative became death.

But after a sleepless night filled with pain, the 19-year-old agreed - becoming one of scores of Haitians who have lost their limbs to the quake.

The prospect of a future without an arm or leg is especially dismaying to Haitians.

"How will I manage to survive on my own with just one leg?" Vital asked, lying lethargically on a metal bed frame at Renaissance Hospital.

Doctors in the Haitian capital say they have performed numerous amputations of hands, arms and legs as overworked medical staff race to care for tens of thousands of patients, even outside hospitals.

Dr Diana Lardy of the Los Angeles-based International Medical Corps said: "The problem is that people haven't got medical care soon enough, so wounds are very infected. Some of them are coming in with bones sticking out from the rest of the leg."

While most injuries occurred when buildings collapsed, Lardy said she was also seeing patients with gashes and other injuries caused by amateur rescuers who frantically dug survivors from rubble with makeshift tools.

Ward space is short. Some buildings at the Port-au-Prince General Hospital suffered quake damage.

Doctors performed 45 amputations at Renaissance in three days, said Dr Olga Maria Delgado of Havana.

Most were done outside on a white-tiled counter under a tin roof in the hospital gardens. She said sterility was less of an issue than usual because most of the wounds were already infected.

At first, patients refused to come inside the hospital for fear the building would collapse from aftershocks.

As they passed, people held handkerchiefs to their noses against the stench of Vital's rotting leg. Flies buzzed around the sheet that covered her and settled on an exposed ankle bandage oozing pus.

"She repeatedly refused to have her leg cut," said her cousin, Chantal Felix.

"But I talked her into it, and she had to accept it after the doctors told her that the gangrene was spreading and she would die."

Vital and Felix work selling secondhand shoes in the Bel Air slum, where they share a room with Felix's 11-year-old daughter.

"What will we do now?" Vital moaned. "What will we do?"

Unfortunately, her worries about the future may not matter. After the operation, with her leg cut above the knee, surgeon Dr Frank Diaz said Vital was severely infected and suffering septicaemia.

"She has not been responding well to all the antibiotics we're giving her," he said. "I think she has a 90 percent chance of dying." - Sapa-AP