Local doctor helps Haiti move to long-term care for quake victims

Dr. Mahesh Raju can't forget the haunting tragedies he encountered following the earthquake in Haiti.

He met a pregnant woman who had dug barehanded through the rubble for 12 days to find her husband and three children, too late to save them.

He saw a 4-year-old boy who, though he was starving, had saved half his food for his brother.

He met an 8-year-old boy who dived under a beam when his school collapsed around him. Trapped in the rubble for hours with a broken leg, the boy eventually was rescued but learned all but four of the school's teachers and other students had been killed.

Yet the people of Haiti, who had been through such horrors, treated Raju kindly and graciously throughout his stay.

"They're beyond grateful," Mahesh said. "They're very appreciative of everything and know they'll need our help for a long time."

Raju, 31, an internal medicine physician, grew up in Crystal Lake and graduated from Elgin Academy. He went to Haiti as part of a medical aid team from Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.

A big part of their mission, in the aftermath of the Jan. 12 quake, was to help with the transition from emergency treatment to long-term medical care for victims.

To help accomplish this, the team brought about 50 bags of medical supplies, including drugs, intravenous fluid and antibiotics.

They stayed at a school near Port-au-Prince and worked with French interpreters at different locations, mostly at the general hospital.

There, Raju helped set up an intensive care unit for patients sick from wound and amputation infections, tetanus and malaria, and other conditions like diabetes and heart failure.

Many illnesses were caused by the quake, and others were the result of stress and emotional trauma, while still more were brought about afterward by living outside in mosquito-infested tent cities with no food or sanitation.

One man was paralyzed in a stampede for food dropped from an aid helicopter.

Another man had suffered a cut on his head, then days later developed lockjaw and couldn't eat. Doctors initially thought a stroke might be causing the condition, until they realized it was a tetanus infection attacking the nerves.

They gave the man antibiotics and think he is going to survive.

Raju had seen poverty before in India, but the lack of infrastructure and medical workers following the disaster made the situation worse in Haiti.

Because so many doctors had treated patients then gone home, Raju's team worked to establish continuity of care, so when one medical team left, the next had the proper records and supplies to care for the patients.

Raju hopes someday to return.

"What I take away is not to forget about what's going on down there after the media leaves," he said. It's probably going to take a few years for them to recover."