Haunting images

My good friend Maureen Jarrell was also in Haiti earlier this month.

Maureen, a Greensboro gynecologist, was there with Durham-based Family Health Ministries for several days of health clinics in one of Port-au-Prince's poorest slums.

She'd been there before. She'd seen the hopelessness. But during this trip she saw the face of poverty like she never had before. The images still haunt her.

Most of the women Maureen saw had minor, easily treatable conditions. Two, though, stood out.

One was a young mother with a 5-month-old baby. Her husband had left. She had no money, no food. She was so malnourished her breast milk had dried.

"She and her baby will be dead in six months," Jarrell said. "There was nothing I could do."

Another woman had advanced cervical cancer. Even with the best of care she would die. That was hard enough to tell the woman.

But she had another condition that Jarrell would have been able to treat. It would have given the woman significant relief in her dying days.

The tumor pressed against the tube that empties the bladder, shutting it off so that the woman could not urinate. Pressure was building. It was painful and uncomfortable. Jarrell needed an inexpensive catheter. There was none.

"That was the hardest thing I've ever had to do as a doctor, knowing there was nothing I could do to help," Jarrell said.

She and more than a dozen others who made the trip saw more than 700 patients at a clinic set up in a school in the sprawling slum.

Nearby Family Health Ministries is building a medical clinic. Its slow progress offers hope to residents there. Once completed, it will be staffed continually by Haitian doctors and nurses who will have supplies like catheters. But it may take several years for the ministry to complete the clinic.

That will be too late for the young mother, her baby and the woman with cervical cancer. But maybe not for other critically ill patients who need treatment in the future.

"I left Haiti in despair," Jarrell said. "I hope that when the clinic is finished, desperate patients will have better options for care than we could offer."