The great moving

I don't know much about disaster relief and how it normally happens, but one of the hardest things those first few days was a lack of unity and consistency. Every group and even every individual that came in wanted to do their own thing. With each new shift and wave a people there was a new way of doing things. One group wanted to give everyone their meds at the same time, another wanted to do it on an as needed basis and write down times, others wanted to give the patients meds to keep taking on their own.

So much was done and re-done in different ways. Someone would change a bandage and as they were just finishing taking off the bandage someone else would say, I just cleaned and changed that bandage 10 mins. ago. It was chaos!

Then we got a new leader on the floor. He had worked lots of other disasters and he was going to get us organized! First, he wanted everyone and I mean EVERYONE cleared out of the main area, which happened to be the open area outside of the pharmacy. That was going to be the intensive care area, so everybody needed to be moved out, then evaluated and only the worst off patients moved into that area. There would be NO EXCEPTIONS!

That seems easy enough until you are moving a patient with burns over about 65% of his body and another guy with a chest tube and others with severed limbs and others. . . and others. . . and moving them not once, but twice . . . first out then in. NO EXCEPTIONS.

I thought we might loose a couple of the guys just in the moving process. It seemed so wrong and so harsh. I hated being a part of it and throughout the process the echos of the pained screams rang in my ears.

Finally it was over. The next day success of the effort was declared because the only two patients that had died that night had died in the intensive care area, and so we knew that they were not likely to make it and were doing all that we could for them, while those who were in less urgent conditions and were going to make it through the night, were perhaps given less attention.

I still don't know why we couldn't just assume that the guy with the chest tube and the guy with the burns would be in the critical care area so that they didn't have to be moved twice, but it wasn't my call and I was kind of relieved just to have a leader at that point to organize the chaos.

It may not be worth much, but I did make one contribution that night. While the leader wanted to use boxes of supplies to divide the most critical area from the second most critical area, I convinced him to keep the supplies in the pharmacy and to divide the two areas with a ace wrap rope that I made. I also sent our team out to get tarps to keep the sun off the burn victim and our other critical care patients. Thinking creatively is crucial in these circumstances. ;)