I had every intention of sitting down today and journaling about the "new crew" here at Medishare; about the three new pharmacists, and three rockstar graduate interns (anointed "pharmacists" by the powers vested in me as CPO...). About how there is now an AJ and another PJ in camp, the downpour of rain that flooded our sleeping tent (and brought out the biggest, nastiest looking tarantula I've ever seen), meeting a midwife from Bandon (OR). That was my intention, but all I can think of is one thing: FIRE.
The word strikes fear; hearing people scream "FIRE" causes panic, stampedes, and can test the strength of a group. I woke up this afternoon in a total daze - clearly it was all a dream - who evacuates a hospital not once, but twice in one night? But the soreness in my throat and aching muscles told me that this was clearly NOT a dream.
I was headed into to the PEDs/OR tent when I heard someone yell "FIRE" and saw a rush of people coming towards me. Someone was yelling about cutting the power, so I ran to find Tom (our COO). When I saw him running towards the tent, I headed back to help evacuate the children. It was chaos; children being thrust into the arms of whomever was nearby, and then someone yelled "it's near the oxygen tanks - RUN!". My heart has never pounded so hard in all my life - I was half expecting the place to blow up like you see in the movies. While it was true - it was sort of near the oxygen tanks - the flames and smoke was coming from one of the 100-pound light fixtures in the OR (back of the tent), more smoke than anything else, and we had all the tanks moved before it could have even gotten close to causing a Hollywood-style-explosion.
The power was cut, and we headed in with headlamps to make sure all the babies were out of the PICU - I was sure the nurses had grabbed them, but we had so many that we were putting them in crates on one of the exam tables, and I was scared one of them might have been missed in the chaos. I checked to make sure the building was empty, then grabbed my compounding supplies. Looking back, I'm sure it was a funny sight - me running from the smoke-filled building with a bedpan full of mortar, pestle, graduated cylinder, etc...
Thank God this didn't happen last week, when our NICU/PICU was pretty full and we had 8 patients vented. I can't even begin to imagine how our patients felt - so soon after the earthquake, and now two evacuations, they must have been scared to death.
We evacuated everyone to the gravel parking area/road. It was fairly chaotic - Tom (COO) was working on the immediate fire danger, Jen (CNO) was trying to figure out how to fit everyone in the medsurg tent, and there was no one taking charge of the people evacuated into the parking area, so I figured it was time to put my years of crisis intervention training to use. I went about delegating people to tasks - patients families were worried about their stuff being stolen, so I posted security at the tent. All of our volunteers were out working, so I sent the Tennessee Baptists (non-medical volunteers) to guard our area. I grabbed Kinsey (one of the translators), and went through the crowd making the same announcement over and over - there was an electric fire, we cut the power, we are safe now. Everyone will be moved into the Adult/Medsurg tent. We've got a reporter from the AZ Star staying with us right now, and this morning he said to me "I'm not sure if I got any photos of you, but I sure got AUDIO of you". Apparently I have a fairly loud, authoritative voice...
About the time everyone got settled in the medsurg tent, two of the light fixtures in THAT tent flamed up, and we had to evacuate that tent. It is nothing short of a miracle that no one was trampled to death. The next tent over is the sleeping quarters for volunteers, and it occurred to me that people were still sleeping. I walked every isle of the tent, calmy (but LOUDLY) telling people "there have been some electrical fires, we are evacuating the hospital. Grab your headlamps and any spare chairs or blankets".
Power was cut everywhere except the ER, where we had the ICU patients. With the evacuation completed, it was now time to set up our "hospital" in the parking lot - and patients still needed meds. I turned to my crew and said "Remember when you were in school, doing SOAP notes, and the first problem was always "what will kill the patient first?", grab THOSE drugs." Pain, cardio/crash kit, asthma and seizures. Antibiotics are not a priority unless it's a septic patient, and none of ours are. We set up a mobile pharmacy in a central location with these drugs, huge jugs of water, diapers, baby formula, etc.
Word came from Tom - all the light fixtures were being taken down, and we needed to clean out the muddy, trashed mess that was our medsurg tent so we could get all the patients back in before there was more rain. Kinsey and I went through the crowd again, announcing in English and Creole "We have identified the problem, all of the light fixtures will be taken down. We will be staying out here until everything is safe." Picnic tables were moved in to put huge cherry-picking-ladders on to remove the fixtures, and cleaning solution was poured on the floors. We cleaned the tent as best we could to make it less of a hazard. A gigantic flood light was hooked up and moved out to the parking lot area, and we tried to calm patients and get some sense of order.
We decided to man the mobile pharmacy in shifts - now that the immediate danger was taken care of, some of us would need to sleep so we could be functional in the morning to relieve those of us staying up. The three people scheduled to be the "night shift" stayed with the mobile pharmacy, and the rest of us headed to bed. An hour and a half later, someone came yelling through the tent for one of the doctors, and I woke up with a start. Since I couldn't get back to sleep, I headed out to help and was brought to tears by what I saw. Army and Air Force soldiers, carrying our patients on their cots back into the medsurg tent. I relieved my three pharmacists, and "babysat" the mobile pharmacy until we moved back into the tent (after all the patients had been settled). By dawn were all settled safely (and snugly) in the medsurg tent.
It is amazing that our hospital functions as smoothly as it does on a daily basis - imagine if 95% of your staff turned over every week, working long hours sometimes in very harsh conditions. Now imagine throwing a fire into the mix. Not that I would ever EVER wish for something like this to happen, but it was one of the most amazing things I have ever been part of - it could have been so bad, but we worked together so well and the outcome was nothing short of a miracle. As one of our plastic surgeons (Harvey) said, "this was a test, and we passed."
~PJ
No comments:
Post a Comment