• Last Saturday, my son Ross Isaacs, M.D. called and shared with me that he was leaving for a trip to aid the needy through an organization he has donated his medical services to:  The group is called RAM, or Remote Area Medicine.  This trip was scheduled for a week long commitment to the frenzied, frightening country of Haiti.  Ross is a nephrologist, who donates his time frequently to RAM, when there is a catastrophic event or for health care in the United States. Even though he is a specialist, our country needs and uses RAM for various poor areas of the United States to provide needed health care for the poor and underprivileged, and the uninsured.
• Ross had his son drive him from Charlottesville Virginia to Richmond to hook up with transportation on the long and tedious journey to his destination to help the earthquake victims of Haiti.  He called by some sort of telecommunications on Sunday night, that he arrived and spent two days in the airport in the Dominican Republic, because of lack of transportation and safety concerns to protect the many donated medical teams from all over the United States.  He finally made it to the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic by Monday after eight more hours of driving.
• Upon arrival, a resident doctor from New York left, and Ross and two other doctors  began the tedious, dangerous and upsetting ordeal of very primitive health care to the hundreds of people in this field hospital on the border.  Ross said that “it was just like” “Civil War” Medicine.  Ross had brought many donated medical things to treat the very injured population.  He shared with me that in one day, he ran out of everything, and that his needs were for basic medications, and just basic medical needs to run this “Mash” unit.  He shared with me the depth of treatment and the pain and suffering of the injured from the Haitian earthquake.
• The smell and sight of death was everywhere, and people were dying because of lack of basic medicine.  He spoke of a man with a spinal injury who would never walk again, and whose spine remained completely exposed.  As of today, the man is still alive, but will have serious consequences due to the inability to get a neurosurgeon into the primitive area.  He went to medical school in Mexico, where medicine was not the same as the United States, and later trained in the United States at Stanford and other hospitals.  He has for the last fifteen years donated his extra time to help the poor, or injured in earthquakes, or high altitude medical care in the Himalayas

More to come as things develop.

-Diane