Local Doc Brings Help to Haiti
Dr. Siedenburg, right, with a patient who had her left leg amputated, fractured femur with external fixator on right leg, and was 7 1/2 months pregnant. Siedenburg said, “I tried to fly her out to another hospital but she was in too much pain to sit upright and that was all the room they had. Helicopter left her.” Photo courtesy Eric Sidenburg.Emergency physician and Laguna resident Eric Siedenburg stood in a sea of people and tents outside of a makeshift hospital in Jimani, Dominican Republic. Hundreds of Haitian earthquake victims moments ago had been inside the half-built orphanage turned field clinic. The beds were suddenly emptied by a 6.1 aftershock. Two people jumped from the second floor, one of them becoming partially paralyzed.
A small tent city was soon erected. No one would go back in.
“These people were so traumatized,” said Siedenburg. “We couldn’t really understand it, but what they had seen was so horrific, they couldn’t even think about going back into a building.”
The scene outside minutes after the second earthquake emptied the hospital. Photo courtesy Eric Sidenburg.Jimani, the closest Dominican border town to Port-au-Prince, was hit by streams of Haitians leaving their shattered capital by truck, helicopter, or on foot. In response to the influx, the Dominican government pulled the border back, according to Siedenburg, leaving the outpost as a neutral zone between its home country and its crippled neighbor to the west. Good Samaritan Hospital, a make shift facility occasionally visited by traveling doctors that sits in the small town about 30 miles from the Haitian capital had become crowded with refugees, many with horrible injuries, and the hospital was at capacity, with little staff or supplies. Teams of medical workers began arriving one by one. Siedenburg’s was one of them.
Dr. Eric Siedenburg with his wife Charisma, daughter McKenna, 3, and Ronan, 1, at home in Laguna Beach. Photo: Ted Reckas.
“You would hear this screaming going on. They were doing everything just with Motrin,” he said. Siedenburg immediately unpacked a red fanny pack filled with pain- killers. “We had needles and we’d get everything ready and hit them, do the dressing change, they’d wake up and we’d move to the next patient…I was doing it on my knee, in the dirt, injecting it into people, and changing the wounds out in this tent city that developed.”
A physician at Saddelback Memorial Hospital, Siedenburg, was part of a self-organized, self-funded team of doctors and ICU nurses that returned last Wednesday after a week in Haiti. Siedenburg is a veteran of similar harrowing experiences. He traveled the world on a fellowship after medical school, providing emergency care in impoverished places like Papua New Guinea, Peru, China, Nepal, and Africa. The team leader, Jim Keany, is an emergency physician at Mission Hospital and medical director for JetWest International Air Ambulance. They received donated supplies and equipment from their respective hospitals and drugs from a local pharmacy.
Denise, with her baby Anika, who had a crush injury to her arm. Denise was very septic and went to the operating room, where she went into cardiac arrest, but was resuscitated. Here she is reunited with her baby. Photo courtesy Eric Sidenburg.But the destruction nearly overwhelmed them.
“I went and worked after Hurricane Katrina. I thought that was rough,” Siedenburg said, “That was nothing compared to what we were doing here and seeing here. It was just insane what those people are going through.”
One evening a pick-up truck pulled up. Two of the three patients suffered from broken facial bones that had separated from their skulls. Siedenburg, with 14 years experience, was shocked due to the rarity of the injury.
“The amount of force necessary to cause that normally kills you,” he explained, “You could go a whole life in the U.S. and never see that. Here were two in the back of the same truck.”
Dr. Eric Siedenburg (R), with a patient who suffered pelvic and lumbar fractures. Photo courtesy Eric Sidenburg.
One of Siedenburg’s colleagues had to remove one of the patient’s eyes to keep an infection from spreading to the rest of her head. Since he had never done the procedure before, he got on the phone with an ophthalmologist from Saddleback, who talked him through it. All in an hour’s work in Jimani.
Siedenburg describes his first day there: “I stayed until about two a.m. because I was working there the next morning at seven and wanted to know what went on there. When I showed up the next morning they said, ‘You’re the lead ER doctor now.’”
Siedenburg spent the day getting the place organized: numbering the beds, identifying where patients were, making an order sheet detailing what was needed, and tracking when medications had been given.
“By six p.m. we felt like we had done an amazing thing that day,” he said, “we started to solidify it, and then there was another earthquake.”
Luckily Jimani was far enough from the epicenter that its infrastructure had survived; they had electricity via generator, a water supply refilled daily by trucks, and cell phone reception.
“The triage area three minutes after the earthquake. It had previously been teeming with patients and beds,” said Siedenburg. Photo courtesy Eric Sidenburg.A call from his daughter McKenna helped immeasureably. “Daddy! How are you doing! Are you helping people?” she asked. “That was a huge help, sanity wise,” said Sidenburg.
Eventually security went downhill, however. A team of Harvard doctors who had gotten there earlier established a command structure and after working for several days, left, thinking order was in place. “Then it slowly started to fall apart,” Siedenburg explained.
More and more people appeared on the grounds, though the patient census was stable. “We said, ‘Who are all these people?’ Turned out they were just looking around for food to steal. Our interpreters said they heard people saying they were going to come back tonight and steal stuff.”
Siendeburg happened to be leaving the next day. His first few days at home were spent attempting to gather another team and resources to return this week, but the effort was abandoned this past Sunday. The security situation in Jimani apparently continued to deteriorate and alternate locations were difficult to reach. Border crossings and support at a refugee camp and medical center in Fond Parisien, Haiti, run by International Medical Corps, could not be guaranteed.
Siedenburg and the team doing their morning rounds. Photo courtesy Eric Sidenburg.
Apparently, the time for freelancing missions like Siedenburg’s had passed; the big organizations were in command now.
The recovery in Haiti has transitioned from initial response, to longer-term treatment. Now, said Siedenburg, “I want some physical therapists. Now we need to start teaching these people with no legs how to walk with crutches. And how to walk on them with one arm. And all these things for the next step. This is going to be months and years.”
Siedenburg isn’t the only Laguna resident helping the cause. A few days after the earthquake hit Haiti, Laguna Beach locals Andrea Egan, Danielle Cavallucci and Shaena Stabler organized fund raising events at local establishments, raising over $12,000 for the Red Cross. Another event is planned for Feb. 24 at Mozambique. For more information go to Love Haiti Event on Facebook.
A boy learns to walk again. Photo courtesy Eric Siedenburg.The Rotary Club Laguna Beach is sending shelter boxes to Haitian earthquake survivors. Each box contains a 10-person tent and supplies. Donations can be sent to the Rotary Club of Laguna Beach Foundation, attn: Haiti Shelter Box donation, P.O. Box 2, Laguna Beach, CA 92652, or by contacting LagunaBeachRotary@cox.net.
Fabiola Thebaud-Kinder, a Haitian-American and Laguna Beach resident, has been working with contacts in Haiti and the Dominican Republic to help a group of doctors from Boston, who are family friends, get transportation to Haiti.
Thebaud-Kinder’s mother Rona Benjamin and stepfather Fritz, an architect, still live in Port-au-Prince. His buildings, including their home, are among those still standing in town, according to Thebaud-Kinder. “A lot of people are coming to him with jobs now,” she said. Her brother Kiko, is also an architect, and is already involved in the rebuilding effort.
Thebaud-Kinder’s daughter Christianne Kinder is a junior at Laguna Beach High School and is one of three Haitian-Americans in the AP French class there. Students recently held a breakfast and ice cream social to raise funds for Haiti as well. 
A one year old girl with burns on her face and body. Photo courtesy Eric Siedenburg.
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