Haiti Day 4

I am feeling very encouraged today, I spoke with the medical director of the clinic on the way in and he was very receptive to my ideas. In fact, he was so excited by some of my proposals that he put them into action as soon as we arrived at the clinic. I think my long email yesterday was very effective.
I personally saw 26 patients today half in the morning at Terrain Acra and the other half at a site where we went in a mobile clinic called Acacia.
One of the interesting cases I saw was a 17 year old with severe anemia, I concluded that it was iron deficiency because her mother said she keeps eating rocks (a condition known as pica). When I asked if she craved ice they both looked at me amazed and said Yes, she eats a lot of ice too. The symptom of craving ice is associated with iron deficiency anemia, did some I research on this earlier in the year hoping to find time to write a paper, which I would still like to.
After all the patients had left a guy came into the clinic complaining of pain in his eye after a piece of metal flew into while he was cutting something metal. Apparently it happened on Monday (3.5 days ago, not a good sign), he had a classic presentation of a corneal abrasion from metal with a very well defined hole right on his cornea. I later saw a guy sawing one of the metal rods that are all over the city from buildings collapsing and I could see exactly how he got the injury!
After the morning clinic I plugged in my IPOD and listened to Andrea Bocelli, I imagined him standing on top of the heap mound singing the song and of how much joy his gift would bring the people listening. Crazy huh? Well that thought lead me to another which made me smile to myself because I am so glad that I too have a gift or talent of a different kind that I can share ………. What a privilege!
In the afternoon, we went to Acadia. We had to get down from the car at some point on our way to Acacia because it was not passable and then we trekked over piles of rubble to arrive at our destination. We had to go under a massive pylon that was only being suspended by an electricity cable. Its pretty amazing what you DON’T notice after awhile!
We went to see people who cannot readily get to the clinic at Terrain Acra, even as we left the bulldozer was scooping up rubble, an amazing task. There are USAID crews everywhere trying to clean up stone by stone.