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Part 4: ‘I am ready to go home’
March 3, 2010
Dr. Richard Furman
Following the deadly earthquake that hit Haiti on January 12, 2010, Dr. Richard Furman, a Charleston Southern University Board of Visitors member, was with one of the first medical teams in Port au Prince. He operated on the injured, cared for the injured, witnessed the personal grief through the wailing cries and desperate, distant eyes of Haitians. Dr. Furman boarded a plane back to the United States on January 25, 2010. In a handwritten journal, he reflected on his experience. This is his story.
 I looked further down the ward and saw another lady I had come to know. She was awake. She is 40 years old and began to run as soon as she felt the house shake. Somehow she knew it was an earthquake. She ran and almost made it, but a portion of concrete wall caught her left leg just above the ankle and tore away flesh down to bone.
She was seen at the government hospital, and they placed it in a plaster cast, hoping to save her leg later with an operation. But it was nine days later that she came to our hospital. We gave her a spinal block for anesthesia and placed her on the operating table to remove the packing of gauze stuffed in her wound. It was immediately obvious that her distal tibia was nonviable.
We told the interpreter to ask permission to amputate her leg. The patient began to nod wholeheartedly. There were no tears, no grimace, only the repeated nod. It was evident she had already gone through enough pain and suffering. She wanted relief at any cost, even to remove her leg.
As I stood by her bed last night, I thought of the death of my older brother. He had leukemia and terrible suffering before he died. I thought of his last words to the nurse who came to examine him during the last night of his life. She told me he looked at her and said, “I am ready to go home.”
I think sometimes the pain and suffering prepares our minds for the inevitable happening - whether it is dying or losing a leg. I don’t know for this lady, but being a believer made that decision a lot more peaceful for my brother. Even though we hated to tell her on the operating table we couldn’t save her leg, I realized as I stood by her bed last night how much more peaceful she looked after we had amputated her leg.
The thoughts that sometimes suffering makes some decisions easier ran though my mind as I left her and looked for other patients who had taught me more lessons of life.
The mother was in the bed with the little girl when I went by. Both were asleep.
The children are the worst.
You just feel so bad that they have to go through something like this at their age. I can’t help but think of my grandchildren when I see the ones their age in the hospital. I remembered the first time I saw that little girl. I was afraid she was going to lose her foot. She had only a single block fall on it, but it damaged so much tissue around the open bone. Perhaps we should have gone ahead and amputated when we first saw it, but we kept thinking there may be some way of getting the wound clean enough to swing a flap over the bone. But as I looked at the child and her mother in the bed, I also saw the bandaged distal stump of leg where we had to come to the conclusion two days ago that there was no way to save her foot.
As I sit here in the plane, I realize we are going to have to go back in a few months with prostheses for all the amputations that have been performed. And that will be for thousands who have had feet amputated, legs taken off below their knee, and the ones who had to have the leg removed above the knee. The amputees will need not just months but years of care including rehabilitation and physical therapy.
I remind myself there will still be a lot to be done long after the stories are off the television and nothing is printed about them in the newspaper. I know our job is not finished in Haiti.
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University Relations Web Exclusives
University Relations
Web Exclusives
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