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I'm riding in the back of the make shift ambulance, a bread truck with a tape cross on it and a sign scribbled on paper  “ambulance”. I cling to the newborn baby as we drive through the destroyed streets of Haiti.  Little hands little lips and closed eyes. I hold one of the triplets and try to block the dust from the baby's face.  One of the most motivated compassionate Doctors hold the second and the mother who just a couple days ago gave birth to this angels in a make shift tent on the street holds the third. I sit there and think about everything. I am in a state of shock not only because of the sights and sounds but because just hours ago Liz called me into the communications room. I was in the middle of helping pic a patient off the floor who was covered in their own excrement and flies. I was in the middle off trying to figure out how to get an electric cord for a wound vac. I was in the middle of working with triage for bed placement, I was in the middle of hanging dry IV bags and giving out pain meds, while simultaneously making sure the local help felt appreciated and the volunteer nurses weren’t to burned out. I stop all this and go into the communication tent.  Were Liz from University of Miami tells me I have to leave. Someone has posted a utube video of me. I have still never seen the video but I don’t remember being filmed and in it I am only showing someone who is volunteering were the morgue on the UN base is. I show many people many things. I have oriented new staff and showed them were things are, sometimes I need to show them were non-pleasant things are. Well most of the time I do. The story is this person (I forget there name) after volunteering went back to Florida and went to a found raiser for UM were he freaked out and expressed anger about the waste of monetary resources when on the field it is a war zone. Fund raising is important though and this cause and suffering we see is not caused by the UM but by the fact that we are in a developing country with limited resources after such a terrible earthquake.  He made the wrong people mad and I got caught in the cross fire because he had posted this video of me that I didn’t even know existed.

 

I have seen a lot of misery here but this news was very hard for me to swallow. I know it might sound selfish but when you have no control over the suffering you see and you work as hard as you can to relieve it there is at least a sense that you are trying. This situation has taken me by surprise. I have been one of the nurse coordinators for a while now, and I have often worked around the clock with little sleep because of our nursing shortage (sometimes 1 nurse to 40 patients) I have been complimented by al the doctors and staff I have worked with.  I have become close with my patients and try in the mist of such trauma to be a patient advocate. With code after code it can be heard to remember and hard to find the time to treat each as an individual. Often its hour 25 or 26 of work were I finely get a second to go over to the patients and hand them a water, give them a hug and hear how their day was.

 
It is hard to understand how someone at the University of Miami who has never met me would make such a decision. Every day we are bombarded by the media followed by reports interrupted by cameras in our face I don’t have time to regulate and conform the flow of all those that come in.  But this one video that shows nothing from what I hear only shows the morgue not even the bodies has really ruffled someone’s feathers. It’s even more hurtful that the ones on the ground with me didn’t fight to have me stay. The only reason I am here is to help people. I never complained about the lack of bathrooms or the disorganized food situation or the critical shortage of nurses that have left us working constantly. A moral dilemma, either I sleep and my patient don’t get care, or I force myself to stay awake and just keep moving.

 

After hearing that I had to leave I rest I went into my tent in a daze. I remember there that I haven’t been drinking and all the sudden I cant even keep my eyes open and im to tired to try to drink, one of the nurses hooks an IV bag up to me and I lie there in a state of shock and desperation. I Have other options and after a little rest I try to pull myself together and I pack up my stuff. I walk over to the air field and find a pilot I know, I will be flying out with him to Leogane tomorrow, landing on the beach we will distribute supplies, some that I have helped him get from our supplies. The other day I sent him out with bags of animal crackers. Tomorrow I will start working at the General as well. But my heart breaks about how I have been treated by the University of Miami. I felt like a family and now I feel like an outcast, I cant dwell to much on this though, for no matter were I am I can help. But it makes me sad to realize something that I have been a part of since the begginging can just dismiss me with out even talking to me.  well my battier is almost dead and I don’t have a charger