Practicing with Dr. Mike Cobb at West Tennessee Bone & Joint Clinic, P.C., are Dr. Lowell Stonecipher, Dr. David Johnson, Dr. Kelly Pucek, Dr. Harold Antwine, Dr. David Pearce, Dr. Jason Hutchison, Dr. Adam Smith, Dr. Doug Haltom and Dr. John Everett. West Tennessee Bone & Joint Clinic is at 24 Physicians Drive. For an appointment, call 731.661.9825 or 888.661.9825.
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Saving Lives in Haiti, Winter 2010
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| Dr. Mike Cobb visits with a patient who suffered injuries in the earthquake in Haiti. |
One week later, Dr. Cobb, who practices at West Tennessee Bone & Joint Clinic, was in a converted hospital on the Haitian border treating orthopedic injuries and saving lives.
“It would have bothered me not to go,” he says, having heard on the radio after the quake that Haiti had a desperate need for orthopedic surgeons to treat survivors. “Many of the people who suffered head and thoracic injuries died in the rubble,” he said. “Those who survived primarily had injured extremities.”
Dr. David Vanderpool, a Nashville general surgeon who used to practice in Jackson, was already in Haiti and arranged for Dr. Cobb and local nurse anesthetist Bill Ragon to be included in a private plane that was flying a medical team from Knoxville to the Caribbean island. They arrived in the Dominican Republic, which shares the island with Haiti.
A bus took them to Jimani, a town just outside the Haitian border and 35 miles from Port-au-Prince, where an orphanage had been converted into a hospital. “On the way, they said we had 150 cases waiting on us,” Dr. Cobb said.
The “suffering chaos” he saw when he first arrived at the hospital was overwhelming, a situation he had never been in before. “No one has,” he says. Too many of the Haitian buildings were poorly built and crumpled in the earthquake, killing and injuring as they fell.
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| Dr. Mike Cobb, at left. sits with Dr. David Vanderpool, a former Jackson surgeon now living in Nashville, on the porch of the converted hospital. |
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| Dr. Cobb uses a drill during leg surgery. |
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| An orphanage was converted into a hospital. |
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| The courtyard outside of the converted hospital is filled with patients and their families. |
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| Dr. Cobb, at left, works with a physician from Missouri to fix a broken leg. |
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| The patient, above, has a new external fixator on her leg to stabilize her broken bone and allow the fracture to being healing. |
Dr. Vanderpool set up the hospital after witnessing people getting amputations on the streets without anesthesia. “It was Civil War medicine,” Dr. Cobb said, “and David knew we could do better.”
During that week they set to work treating patients and were joined by medical teams from Spain, Puerto Rico, New York, Nebraska and other places.
Their first day in Jimani, seven days after the earthquake struck, was spent treating critical open wounds and organizing patients. Through a triage system, physicians were treating the most vulnerable patients first.
By the second day, Dr. Cobb and anesthetist Ragon had established themselves in their own “operating room.” They used the room during the day; Puerto Rican doctors operated there during the night.
“I treated mostly femurs, lower legs, ankles and forearms with external fixators and did some amputations,” Dr. Cobb said. “It was often lifesaving to amputate an extremity infected with an open wound.” One of his patients who refused amputation later died of infection.
Though the medical care at the hospital was much better than what many were getting, Dr. Cobb still had to adjust his medical approach to each problem. For example, he did amputations with a hacksaw he got at Lowe’s and brought with him.
“We did not have the luxury of x-rays,” Dr. Cobb said. “We would blindly feel where the fracture was” and then would stabilize the bone in place by inserting pins in the bone above and below the fracture and attaching them to a rod, called an external fixator, outside the limb. The external fixator would stabilize the bone with reasonable alignment, decreasing the pain and allowing the fracture to start healing, he explained.
On the first day in surgery, five surgical teams had 80 cases. In the first two days, they attached more than 50 external fixators. Like the Bible story of the loaves and fishes, they watched their supply of external fixators dwindle, but they never ran out. More would be delivered just in time.
Operating out of the Dominican Republic made it easier to get necessary supplies, Dr. Cobb said. Private donors could more easily and efficiently send supplies through the Dominican Republic, while the bureaucracy in Haiti hindered relief efforts, he added.
Dr. Vanderpool would go to devastated areas, find people in need of medical care and bring them to the hospital.
Dr. Cobb was ready to stay a second week, but more orthopedic surgeons were arriving to help. He and the rest of his team had arrived at the most critical time. “It was a blessing to me to be there because of the immediate need,” he said. “By the time I left, it was rewarding to look over the multitude of people at the hospital and see that all had been treated.”
As he talks about Haiti, Dr. Cobb says he is grateful that his partners at West Tennessee Bone & Joint Clinic made it possible for him to go to Haiti. He had only two days to get ready once he found out about his spot on the private plane. Dr. David Johnson took care of all of his patients the day he left. His partners saw his patients and covered for him while he was gone. “I appreciate that,” he said. “Being in a multi-partner clinic freed me up to go.”
He finds himself blessed in other ways, too. “I got to see how one culture deals with adversity — in this case the toughness and patience of the Haitian people. I was fortunate that what I do as an orthopedic surgeon is what they needed, and that I got to go to Haiti so quickly and help that many people.”
He continues to worry about medical care for the Haitian people. External fixators, for example, usually are removed after six to eight weeks. He wonders how patients will get back to a clinic or hospital to get that done. He also worries about the spread of disease in Haiti, the need for vaccines and other problems.
He’s willing to go back if the opportunity arises. His experience, he said, “adjusted my world view of adversity and suffering — and what we have here with our medical care.”