VIDEO: Our news partner WCVB talks with Dr. Dave David about his time in Haiti
In normal times, Dave David is a cosmetic surgeon with a busy practice in Dedham. In Haiti, he became simply a doctor doing whatever he could to save his patients, from amputations to emergency Cesareans, “make-shifting everything.”
“You don’t have the instruments, you don’t have the tools, you don’t have the drugs,” he says. “You do what you have to do to save the life.”
With the country like a war zone after its Jan. 12 earthquake, David says, he would do anything, “because anything I could do for these people would be 100 times better than anything they could have, because they’d die” otherwise.
David has delivered emergency medical care to a disaster-stricken nation before: Five years ago he went to Sri Lanka in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004.
“This made Sri Lanka look like a resort,” David says of Haiti. “It was just a mess over there. Just a mess.”
Merely getting there was a travail in itself.
“I didn’t know whether I could at the last minute go because they needed docs right away,” but David decided to go with a California group, World Ministries.
On Wednesday evening, Jan. 20, he went to his gate at Logan and learned his flight to Newark was delayed by an hour and a half. He had to make the Newark flight, or else he would miss the group’s scheduled ride from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic to Haiti.
“I said to the gate agent, I have to get out tonight…if this flight’s delayed, I’m going to miss my connection in Newark,” recalls David, 58, who lives in Norfolk. He asked if there was anything she could do.
Flights to Newark were being held up because of high winds there, and David’s flight was 14th in the queue to take off. After the agent called the Logan control tower and said she had a surgeon going to Haiti, the controller moved the flight up to first in line.
Then the Continental Airlines agent did something else for David: she called the captain in Newark and asked him to wait. That flight was held up for 45 minutes, until David landed in New Jersey and was rushed on a cart between gates.
He arrived in Santo Domingo in the middle of the night. In a hotel lobby he met an Italian guy, Giuseppe, who said Haiti was very dangerous, that there were people in the streets with machetes.
With Giuseppe’s help, “I bought a machete for everybody for the team for protection, and also big knives,” David says. “By this time it’s getting kind of scary. I went over there to take care of patients, and now it seems like the primary concern is our lives.”
In the Dominican capital he also bought regular hacksaws and battery-operated home drills for amputations, and stocked up on pain drugs and antibiotics.
The team’s convoy departed at 1 p.m. Thursday afternoon, arriving at the border at about 9:30 p.m. They camped out on the Dominican side, in an old deserted church building which had three walls still standing. They crossed the border the next morning around 7, tensely driving through Haiti for three hours, until they arrived at a church compound and clinic about an hour outside of Port-au-Prince.
David says they all slept outside, about a mile from where mass graves held 40,000 bodies. The stench was so bad that he put eucalyptus oil in his nose to ward it off when he went to sleep.
Among the living, the medical situation was desperate. David says he saw countless crushing injuries, compound fractures with bones sticking out of skin, and “maggots inside all these open wounds.”
“Everywhere we went, people were dying, people were hurting,” he says.
Most hospital buildings had collapsed, so they were taking care of patients in their yards. Such was the case at General Hospital, which moved into 50 or more tents outside, David says. He did most of his surgery in “the Swiss tent.”
He says pregnant women lay on the ground, giving birth in the dirt and mud. One 17-year-old girl had congestive heart failure.
Working with a shortage of sterile instruments, anesthetic, and electricity, “we had to make do with what we had,” David says.
The doctor, who used to do a lot of obstetrics and gynecology, delivered many babies in Haiti – doing many emergency Cesarean sections with very little anesthetic, swatting flies away. He even did an emergency hysterectomy, taking out a woman’s uterus after she gave birth.
Though David went to medical school more than three decades ago, doing Caesarians came back to him easily. He had not done one in 15 years, but when he picked up the knife, “I felt like I never left it,” he says. “It’s amazing what your mind and body can do, and what it remembers, when you’ve done it for so many years.”
Overall, faced with so many serious injuries, “it was just a matter of tending to as many patients as you can,” David says. Many people had to have legs amputated – but, as he put it, you do amputations to save the life.
Written medical records were primitive. “Once you sewed them up and put the bandage on the abdominal wound, you’d write right on the bandage the surgery you did, the date, the antibiotic you gave them, and what the plan was,” so the next doctor would know what to do, David says.
Though he slept on the ground, and didn’t really take a shower for the week, David says he couldn’t complain, compared to what other Haitians had.
He took a nice shower in Florida on Tuesday night, Jan. 26, after an Air Force cargo plane took him out of Port-au-Prince to Homestead Air Reserve Base in Miami. He returned to Boston the following day.
David says “it turned my life upside-down to go” on the trip, which cost him a lot of income for the lost days away from his practice, Medical Face & Body Aesthetics on Providence Highway. But he figured life has been good to him, and he wanted to give something back.
His Haitian patients were “so stoic,” he says, even with the pain they must have been going through.
Despite it all, he says, many of the people he treated were still trying to be hopeful, looking ahead.
“I probably saved hundreds of lives,” David says. “It’s just a drop in the bucket compared to what’s needed, but I think if everyone does their part, we can certainly make a difference.”
Dedham Transcript staff writer Edward B. Colby can be reached at 781-433-8336 or ecolby@cnc.com. Check in with the Haiti Headlines blog to read local coverage of the Haiti crisis.
