|
Parking Lot Triage
Buck Taylor (BTaylor{at}chphealth.org) is director of the Gallatin Community Clinic in Bozeman, Montana, and is a volunteer fire captain/emergency medical technician. He was in Louisiana 5–10 September 2005. MAKING USE OF MY five-year-old’s frequent flyer miles, by September 5 I was part of a Seattle-based nongovernmental organization medical team standing outside the New Orleans Convention Center. The scene was eerie. Debris and refuse went on and on, as far as the eye could see, often in small hills. Guarding the grand building was a New Orleans police car sitting on rims, stripped of its contents and dignity. The heat was sweltering, and a thick, ghastly smell permeated everything. It was as if someone had taken garbage, put it in a sauna for a week, then added in raw sewage and other organic remains. The Convention Center was a place where people without transportation to leave the city had spent five days without food, water, power, or medical care. Now, working in one of its outdoor parking lots, we had the task of medically stabilizing any evacuees who needed attention before they went by helicopter or bus to the New Orleans airport for care and shelter. We cleaned, we bandaged, and we hydrated. We lowered blood pressures, we raised blood sugars, but mainly we held hands and listened. In the four days we spent there, our hodgepodge volunteer team, working alongside the wonder-working Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, met incredible people. One man had waded through the water again and again to rescue twenty-three strangers, carrying them to safety on his back. Now he said he had nothing left in the world and barely spoke. Miss Mildred, a slight, mischievous woman, cackled when I told her to drink plenty of water. "Not unless it’s mixed with bourbon," she told me. The fetid floodwaters created tremendous public health risks. Leg wounds were readily infected, and skin rashes were common. In desperation, a mother of two-month-old twins had finally mixed their formula with dirty water; one twin now had sepsis. On September 9, a pair of crisply uniformed officers from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) showed up to introduce the two-page form they wanted filled out on every patient seen at the triage site. Good idea. But, we delicately pointed out to the well-meaning officers, since it was now eleven days after the storm, a number of patients had already moved through triage. But most startling to me was that the limited care we provided in the steamy parking lot was perhaps the best access to health care some of these folks had had in a long time—or ever. They were poor, and because they were poor they did not get medical care. High blood pressure and diabetes ran rampant, yet we saw hundreds of patients who told us—or sometimes we could tell—that their conditions had never been treated. The poor of New Orleans deserved more. As an American, I was aghast that it took a disaster of this magnitude to provide them with basic health care.
| ||||||||||||||||||||
