"Where hope floats; Aboard the Comfort, medical workers, many from Massachusetts, fight to bring healing and compassion to desperate Haitians" by Brian MacQuarrie, Globe Staff | February 6, 2010
ABOARD THE USNS COMFORT - David Louizar, an 8-year-old survivor of the Haiti earthquake, lay dazed in his bunk in this floating Navy hospital, his right arm and right leg amputated and a piece of flesh grafted onto the gaping hole where his nose had been.
Dr. Marjorie Curran, a pediatrician from Massachusetts General Hospital, spoke quietly with David and his father, checking on the stunned and broken boy whose slow but probable recovery is the product of luck and medical mastery amid the hell that has devastated Haiti.
Yeah, ANOTHER INSTANCE where the GLOBAL GOVERNMENT has FAILED -- if it was ever intended to succeed in helping Haitians, which I strongly doubt.
Trapped under his crumpled house, David had been freed and flown by helicopter to this state-of-the-art ship that now provides the best medical care in Haiti.
Anchored 2 miles off Port-au-Prince, it is the last hope of survival for many of the quake’s most seriously wounded.
For Curran and dozens of other medical workers from Massachusetts who volunteered their services aboard the Comfort, the work has been intense, draining, satisfying, and heartbreaking. Babies have been born, patients have died, and excruciating decisions have been made about who can be saved and who will be left ashore to expire from untreatable wounds.
“The operating rooms have been going 24 hours a day,’’ said Curran, a 47-year-old from Needham, Mass., who stopped midsentence to collect her emotions while speaking of David’s agonizing ordeal....
How come YOU can't get that kind of care, Americans?
And WHY does it take a DISASTER to get this help to the ALREADY-SUFFERING Haitians?
Victories like this are occurring every day aboard the Comfort, where the Massachusetts volunteers and others are working as part of Project Hope, which delivers emergency health care and humanitarian assistance around the world. The ship, the length of three football fields with 12 operating rooms and a crew of 1,200, is a veteran of Hurricane Katrina and the Sept. 11 attack on New York.
Oh, I guess you do get them after government neglects you (and why did they send people into that toxic rubble to cover up and destroy the crime sce...., oh, yeah).
Anyone tell the Haitians we haven't rebuilt the Gulf Coast or New Orleans yet?
Since arriving off Port-au-Prince on Jan. 21, patients and medical supplies have been airlifted to the Comfort in a near-continuous march of relief....
Yup, BOTTLENECKS and LOGISTICAL ISSUES CLEARED up in TWO DAYS after THREE WEEKS of FAILURE, huh, BG?
Captain Richard Sharpe, a trauma surgeon on the Comfort, said the severity and scope of the injuries dwarf what he witnessed in four deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan....
Oh, Lord!!!!!!!!
Still....
Can't you just write the paragraph without that?!
The ship offers the health workers scant refuge from the suffering. They retreat to the deck, from which the aqua-colored bay and nearby Haitian coast seem a benign, tropical paradise....
Ooooooh, sigh!
Hey, feeling good about the tragedy now?
Pffffft!
