Four first-year medical students from the UCF College of Medicine traveled to Haiti over spring break in April to help provide medical care to residents of the island nation devastated by the Jan. 12 earthquake.

 

Rose Dupont, Bryant Lambe, Lynn McGrath and Brittany Moscato spent a week in Haiti dispensing drugs at a hospital pharmacy, handling patient logistics, organizing blood donations, assisting with surgeries and treatment of sick, injured and dying patients at a hospital managed by the University of Miami's Project Medishare.

 

The students worked with Jonathan Colasanti, MD, a resident at Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital, at the makeshift hospital at the Port-Au-Prince Airport. Tents housed surgical, medical, isolation and intensive care units.

 

"I imagine you are well aware of the special young people you have in your inaugural class," Colasanti wrote German after the medical mission trip, "but I wanted to reiterate it. They were full of zeal and energy, ready to be put to work with whatever needed to be done…"

 

In particular, Colasanti pointed out that McGrath and Moscato helped implement new training and communication protocols that continue to be carried out at the hospital, "an impressive feat for a first-year medical student."

 

The students' first duties involved coordinating logistics for obtaining blood supplies, arranging transport of seriously injured patients to the United States for treatment and handling family and burial arrangements for the dead.

 

Dupont and Lambe served as pharmacists, using the medical school training they had just received weeks before and Epocrates, a drug database with more than 3,300 medications they had downloaded on their iPhones. When doctors at the hospital realized the extent of the students' training, they "plucked us out of logistics" and into patient care, recalled McGrath.

 

Moscato participated in a surgery to heal a patient's lacerated liver and inserted a catheter into a baby with a severely distended abdomen. McGrath helped surgically remove debris from the head of a 1-year-old baby who had been trapped under fallen wood after the earthquake. Dupont, who was born in Haiti and speaks fluent Creole, cared for a 23-year-old woman who was dying from tuberculosis while also consoling the woman's father, who had buried eight children in the past few years. Dupont recalled he was crying, "'Why me? Why me? When are my children going to bury me?'" Lambe spent a great deal of time caring for premature babies in the neonatal intensive care unit, where he learned to "kangaroo" the tiny infants, a practice where doctors and nurses wrap the baby tightly to their bodies to provide warmth, security and nurturing.

 

Even though the Haiti relief program could only take four UCF medical students, 11 had volunteered to go.