Corey Robinson, who is now back at work at Lakewood Health System, posed with new friends from Canada, California and elsewhere. His new friends gave him the nickname ‘Fargo’ due to his Midwest accent. He was amazed at how sick the Haitian people were, noting the drinking water was so bad even the Haitians could not drink it. Only bottled water was safe to drink. (Submitted photo) A nurse from Staples who wanted to make a difference in someone’s life found the way to do so in Haiti.

“I wanted to see if I could make a difference, an impact enough to save someone’s life. I can honestly say I lost count how many we saved - who would have died had we not been there.”

That was one comment from Corey Robinson, who is a registered nurse at Lakewood Health System. He recently spent 16 days working in a health care facility in the earthquake devastated capital city of Port-au-Prince. Much of the city was destroyed Jan. 12 when a magnitude 7 earthquake struck, leveling hospitals, the government buildings and homes throughout the city.

Corey Robinson’s family was happy to have him home safe and sound after he spent the last two weeks of May in Haiti. Welcoming the volunteer nurse home were his wife Alina and their children, Benet and Aften. (Staples World photo by Tom Crawford) Health care, which was poor to nonexistent prior to the quake in one of the world’s poorest countries, became even worse. “There were 150 nurses and student nurses killed when the quake hit and the roof of their classroom fell on them,’ Corey said from his home on 7th Street N. E. in Staples.

Corey, a graduate of the CLC nursing program, began thinking about helping out in Haiti shortly after the Jan. 12 earthquake. He contacted International Medical Corp, a group that had people in Haiti within 22 hours of the quake. “The IMC established a tent hospital and emergency room in tents at the university hospital in Port- Au-Prince.” He described it as roughly a four block area that had been hospital buildings before the quake. Some of those buildings survived, and the IMC facility where he served was in one of them. Corey said the university buildings withstood the earthquake better than most.

Conditions in Haiti and at the hospital were unlike anything Corey had been accustomed to. He got off the plane May 17 and walked into a wall of heat and humidity. His first day he spent getting acclimated to the conditions around him. He found himself working with patients from about a four to six block area that had once been a park but was now a tent city, housing an estimated 16,000 people. “The whole city was covered with tents. This was just one area of a city filled with these tent cities. Haitians are very reluctant, several months after the quake, to go into standing buildings, ” Corey said.

Corey spent almost his entire 16 days, until coming home June 1, in this four block strip that included the hospital and a hotel used by the medical team. “You’re setting up a health care system in a country that never really had a health care system before,” he said, describing how the idea of a night shift for nurses was a new concept. The first week he was there, patients were left without attendants at night. “The second week I was there, we transferred care to a night shift,” he said. The first night, no one showed up. The second night, nurses (and two doctors) were there. “You have to understand, most of their medical people have not been paid for the past four months,” Corey added. “Before us, they had never worked overnight.”

Instead, the lucky patients had family members to care for them, usually sleeping on the floor below the patient’s bed. But many had no one. “Everybody here lost somebody. Many lost everybody,” Corey said he learned as he worked in the hospital.

Corey quickly settled into a routine after his first day. People were lined up outside the hospital every day, waiting and hoping to be seen.

“Day One I left feeling very inefficient, it was a new way of nursing, with families taking care of the patients, doing procedures the best they could. Day Two, I chose to do triage. There were at least 200 people lined up by 6 a.m. The worst cases were not always in the front. I would check probably 10 to 20 percent of the line and have the ER filled. Every day I came out to find someone dead. Triage was the hardest part of the trip, I was making life and death decisions every time, bringing someone in, leaving another out.”

The emergency room, Corey said, was filthy. “It didn’t look like a medical facility at all. The ER was on one side, with about 16 beds. The ICU was on the other, with 20 beds. There was virtually no separation between the two areas. The first day he had followed another nurse around. “I was amazed how sick people were, with everything, tetanus, malaria, meningitis, typhoid, you name it.”

He found his interpreter, Little Pierre, to be invaluable. “We did a lot of teaching, a lot of language issues. There was always the interpreter with the triage person. My favorite was Little Pierre.”

Little Pierre told him that ... “the ground shook three feet in both directions when the quake hit.”

Corey was only the second person from Minnesota to work at the IMC facility. His Minnesota accent helped him quickly acquire the nickname ‘Fargo’ from his cohorts. “I was the first person there to come from a small, rural hospital. Everyone else came from 500 bed hospitals or larger,” he said. They were mostly from the east or west coasts. “When I said we had a 28-bed hospital, they thought I meant a 28-bed emergency room.”

Daily conditions were often like scenes from the M*A*S*H television series. “We re-used things there that here we would not dream of reusing. Labs, X-rays were nonexistent. We did have ultra sound, but we ran out of the gel used with ultrasound.

“We had to be resourceful, and called ourselves McGiver Nurses. We were always improvising, making do with what we had, what we could find.”

Corey recalled only once in 14 days that he saw the triage area empty, on a Sunday. Despite the stress, he kept going back to triage. “I felt I could handle it better than some of the others. I felt better about working in the triage area.

The anxiety level among the people was something else. “We felt a slight vibration once and everyone ran. It was just an all-out panic. We didn’t know what it was, I think a truck might have gone by, but it was mass hysteria.” The death estimates from the quake vary but Corey said from 280,000 to 300,000 is an estimate he has heard.

His triage work skills were sharpened, he feels. Almost everyone he saw had dehydration issues. “I asked when was the last time they ate or drank, and they usually replied three or four days. That made it harder to diagnose what their problems were (other than dehydration). I ordered like 100 IV’s every day, personally doing 20 to 50 myself.”

An unresponsive child in their mother’s arms was a frequent case. “By the time they got here, several hours to travel and then two or three hours in line waiting, the child had passed out. I saw many things I’ve never seen before,” he said.

Will he go back? Very likely. “Once you do something like this, you feel obligated to go again,” he said. He would like to go back and perhaps see some progress or improvement. They were in the process of training Haitian doctors and nurses, but it is a diffi cult task to change a culture.

“The doctors and nurses who showed up for the night shift never stayed through the night, the doctors left early and the nurses left about 3 a.m. But you have to understand their culture and that they were often not getting paid.

“They are open to our way of medicine, but it will have to evolve to that level,” he said. The people were also very appreciative of the medical help from foreigners. “I got many, many thank you hugs. I think I heard every way possible to thank somebody.”