LES CAYES, Haiti (AP) – Orderlies pushed Jertha Ylet’s bed from the center of the hospital to one side so that Drs. Michelet Paurus inserts his electronic saws. He was silent as the doctor cut his plaster with whips.
“Today he has to leave the hospital,” said a doctor.
Ylet had refused until the shooters. He had been at Les Cayes’ General Hospital since arriving there on August 14, unconscious and with a broken leg, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake destroyed his home, killing his father and two other brothers and injuring his brother. There is no return house.
A surgeon inserted a metal rod into his left leg on Thursday. Ylet, 25, had not yet got out of bed, especially trying to walk, since she arrived. Her 5-year-old daughter, Younaika, who was not injured, slept in the same bed and spent her days playing with other children around the radio.
One week after the earthquake on the southwestern island of Haiti killed at least 2,207 people, injured 12,268 and damaged nearly 53,000 homes, Ylet represents the problem posed by limited medical care in the region: how to change hospital beds when patients are discharged has nowhere to go.
“I said to the doctor, ‘I don’t have a place to go,'” Ylet said. “I told them everything. The doctor doesn’t understand.”
In the first days after the quake, the hospital was flooded with patients. The victims were lying in squares with cold winds waiting for care. Now there are people in those places, but they release patients or people who have never been treated, who are attracted to the donations of food, water and clothing that come to the hospital every day.
“We have a lot of patients who have been discharged, but are still out,” said Peterson Gede, a hospital superintendent. “Because they know they have received food and water … they have no intention of going.”
On Monday, Gede ordered hospital staff to begin “encouraging” patients to leave, “understanding them that we need beds to accommodate new patients.”
It proved to be easier said than done. Lack of a return home was a major obstacle for Ylet and many others.
Ylet fainted when the wall of his wooden house in Camp-Perrin collapsed on him when the quake began.
His girlfriend, Junior Milord, had left 20 minutes ago to work. He cooled off in the street until the shaking stopped, then ran to Ylet’s house. They found him buried near the house, which, unlike the backyard, had not yet completely collapsed.
“I thought he was dead when I started removing the blocks,” Milord said.
He pulled her out and hoisted a passing car, which took her to a hospital in Les Cayes. “When I woke up I was in the hospital,” he said.
Milord then returned to help dig up Ylet’s father’s body, his cousin and his brother-in-law. Their bodies are still in the grave, because the family has no money to bury them. Milord lost his home, including his two uncles, his aunt and his brother in the earthquake.
Milord said his remaining Ylet brothers were camping in their yard. If Ylet and his daughter leave, he said, they too will stay there.
Across the board, nurse Gabrielle Lagrenade understands this and everyone.
Lagrenade and her 21-year-old daughter, Bethsabelle, have been sleeping outside since the quake. They have difficulty sleeping on a paved road with their heads over six feet[6 m]from the highway. All-night moped, SUVs and tractor trailers drop dust and small stones.
It was the only place around the two-story house where he rented a house on top of a small clothing store. Dirt quickly descends from the road to the river that runs through the back of the house, which is built into the concrete walls reinforced above the canal that runs through the river. The two columns now show the gaps between the floor of the house and the top of the supports. The landlord has wisely chosen to demolish it.
Despite the ordeal, Lagrenade, 52, continues to come every day to work at the hospital, carefully enters and puts on her blankets, and slides down the back of the sidewalks to bathe and returns as her spotless nurse starts a motorbike taxi to take people to work.
Ylet is in her room. About 22 beds spread out in the room. Nurses and doctors wear masks, but patients do not, although no one in Haiti has received the COVID-19 vaccine. Nurses sit around a wooden table at the end. Medical waste is thrown in a cardboard box at the corner.
Lagrenade is not only sympathetic to the problems of Ylet and other homeless patients, but is wise.
Beds are needed, he said.
“Once someone recovers they have to go,” Lagrenade said.
This is what Paurus tries to explain to Ylet.
A psychiatrist who came from Port-au-Prince to grab his leg tried to get him to leave, he said.
“If we decide to keep patients whose homes have been damaged there will be no (new) outpatient facilities,” he said. “We have a lot of patients and emergencies that need a bed.”
Then Paurus took his saws.
After throwing her, Ylet said she would give up her bed, but would camp outside the hospital, because she had been told to come Thursday to meet them.
But then some volunteers brought lunch. At the end of the day, Ylet was still in bed. Milord said no one came back to tell him to leave so he was there.
“The doctor needs to understand that I have nowhere to go and I’m not giving up,” Ylet said. “I’ll stay in the hospital yard and sleep there until I understand.”