Cooper medical team anxious to reach patients in Haiti

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic--Anxious to heal the injured in Haiti, Jessica Mitchell, an emergency room doctor at Cooper University Hospital, was closer to her mission but still frustrated.

Tamping down her impatience with a mechanical chore, Mitchell again counted the group's supplies: 70 pounds of assorted medicines. Two duffle bags filled with plaster-gauze for making orthopedic casts. Boxes of metal "external fixators" used to stabilize major bone breaks.

Mitchell spent two hours sifting, sorting, counting --and agonizing. She and the rest of the medical team were stuck at staging point on the wrong side of the border while the need in Haiti grew by the minute.

"Watching the news is hard," said the Center City resident. "Because you're just, like, 'God, why am I not there?' "

The Cooper team arrived Sunday, the first wave in what is expected to be a two-week medical mission that could eventually involve dozens of volunteers. Eleven more arrived today, bringing the group to 19. But reports of more looting and other acts of violence in Haiti had to be considered.

"Our plans are changing every two hours," Anthony Mazzarelli, Cooper's director of emergency services, said at one point today. The tentative itinerary was to set up operations at a Haitian clinic in Jimani, near the border with the Dominican Republic.

"The need there is acute," said Mazzarelli, 34. "They've done lots of amputations and one of their biggest needs now is for post-op care."

Earlier today, the medical team sat through a short tutorial on disaster medical care, including the most compassionate way to deal with amputees.

"Down here amputating a limb may mean they never walk again because they may never get a prosthesis," said orthopedist David Fuller, 45, who led the discussion. "These people lost everything. They are taking mental inventory of what they have. I don't have my house. Do I have my arms? Do I have my legs?"

In addition to the aesthetic issues, said Fuller, recent amputees ask themselves, "How am I going to take care of myself?"

It's not enough to be good technical doctors, Fuller said. Medical professionals need to empathize with patients, "hold their hands, hold their shoulders."

For Mitchell, at 28 the youngest member of the team, the attraction to a medical career began when she was an undergraduate at MIT and co-founded a student-run emergency medical service for students.

In her senior year, she worked in a lab doing genetic research and also as an EMT for towns in the Boston area. "I really liked the EMT work better," she said. "Lab work is lonely."

A quiet and confident woman with glasses and straight sandy blonde hair, Mitchell married 18 months ago. The couple honeymooned not too far from here, on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia.

As a student at Tufts University medical school, Mitchell worked for three months at a clinic in southern India, which she now hopes prepared her to work with minimal supplies and surrounded by chaos. She has also traveled in Peru and Guatemala.

Mitchell said her husband Jay, a lawyer, is very supportive of her participation in the medical relief mission. "He was texting me every half hour. Are you going? Are you going?"