This will be a short diary, but I thought we might welcome some GOOD news today, and there is some. The USNS Comfort, although it apparently hasn't yet arrived in Port-au-Prince harbor, is within helicopter range of Haiti and received its first patients overnight.
Doctors were treating a 20-year-old man suffering from a spinal fracture and bleeding in the brain and a 6-year-old boy with a fractured pelvis.
Here is a photo of the Comfort's medical personnel treating the 6 year-old:
The Comfort will be the first "level 3" treatment in earthquake-stricken Port-au-Prince, offering complex surgery and intensive care that is unavailable from first-response teams or makeshift field hospitals. In combat parlance, it is akin to a military hospital such as the Army trauma center in Baghdad - the closest full-service surgical center to the action.
The ship's two helicopters are scheduled to begin flying at 7 a.m. today, and one of the first off the ship will carry an assessment team headed by Capt. Rich Sharpe, a trauma surgeon from the Navy hospital in Portsmouth, Va., and a veteran of four combat deployments. He was brought aboard the Comfort not only to serve as a surgeon but to use his experience in establishing medical systems in unknown, potentially dangerous environments.
The ship will work with military teams and relief organizations in Haiti that have critically injured patients needing a higher level of care.
I have the highest kind of respect for the physicians and other medical personnel who are serving on the Comfort, in conditions under which physicians and nurses rarely have to work:
With the addition of 350 medical and service personnel, who were expected to be in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, overnight and to begin arriving on the ship today, the Comfort will exceed its capacity of 1,200 crew members. Officers were making arrangements for crew members to share berths, a practice known as "hot-racking," in which one person sleeps while another is on duty.
These men and women are acting in the highest and best traditions of the medical profession and the Navy.
Here is a link to the article, which is well worth reading in its entirety: http://www.baltimoresun.com/...