Cary orthotist wants to go back to Hatii after volunteering in August

Cary orthotist Gil Gulbrandson always thought that at some point he’d like to use his medical knowledge to help people in disadvantaged parts of the world.

But finding an organization that needed an orthotist for just a week was very difficult, he said. As the sole practitioner in his office, he couldn’t afford to be away any longer than that, he explained.

Eventually, Gulbrandson, owner of Gulbrandson Orthotics and Prosthetics in Cary, joined Project Medishare for Haiti, a relief organization based in Florida.

Spending a week in Haiti this past August — a trip for which he paid $5,000 between plane tickets, immunization and a contribution to Project Medishare — was eye-opening, Gulbrandson, 63, said.

“The situation in Haiti, medical care-wise, is abysmal,”he said. “You still have an awful lot of amputees as a result of the earthquake. From the orthotics and prosthetics side, there is a lot of work.”

Haitians are also struggling with general health issues such as the spread of cholera, he said. “Tent cities were everywhere you went. It was dilapidated, just in terrible disrepair.”

Gulbrandson spent most of his time at Bernard Mevs Hospital in the capital, Port-au-Prince, where he helped train technicians and evaluate and treat young victims of the earthquake that hit Jan. 12, 2010.

The technicians were “great kids” but not very well-prepared, he said. “Their knowledge was very rudimentary. I had to go back to the basics,” he said.

Gulbrandson also helped outfit young patients with back, leg and other kinds of braces. Among his most memorable patients was a little girl named Katianna, he said.

“The last night we were there, we were coming back from dinner with two orthopedic surgeons. We walked into radiology, and there was an X-ray of a 12-year-old girl with a fractured dislocation of her spine,” he said. “She was already an orphan (from the earthquake), and she became a paraplegic when a wall fell on her that evening.”

Gulbrandson helped make a temporary brace for Katianna. Once he got back to Cary, he made a permanent brace for her and shipped it down to Haiti. Katianna finally got the surgery she needed in late September, he said.

Unlike other hospitals in Haiti, Bernard Mevs was open 24/7, which meant its triage area is especially busy with emergencies in the middle of the night.

Armed guards traveled with doctors whenever they had to leave the confines of the hospital campus, Gulbrandson said. “It’s very unstable down there,” he said.

Despite the harsh reality, Gulbrandson want to go back to Haiti in the future, possibly to volunteer at a rehab hospital like the one where Katianna was treated after her surgery. He is married to Deb Gulbrandson, a physical therapist, with whom he has two grown children.

“I had never seen any destruction like that. Eighteen months later (after the earthquake) it was still in-your-face destruction. I was shocking. It was depressing. These are beautiful people, they are wonderful people,” he said. “The reality is, these people need help, and it is not happening.”

Gulbrandson said the experience taught him to believe words he used to say nonchalantly.

“I’ve often times given lip service that the only thing that is important is our health,” he said. “After being down there I realized there is a lot to that. To appreciate what we have, and to appreciate our good health.”