MOA News

Operation Haiti: (view article by the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript)

Area Doctors Help with Healing: (view article by the Keene Sentinel)

Jaffrey orthopedic surgeon spent five days saving lives, building hope

Dr. White in HaitiBradley White had two weeks off in January, and no concrete plans. So when an earthquake devastated Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Jan. 12, he scrambled to find a way to the small Caribbean country to offer his skills as an orthopedic surgeon. White and Dr. Joseph Lupo, of Monadnock Anesthesia Associates, managed to find a way there on Jan. 24 and spent five days caring for the injured.

“Everybody would like to be able to help, but it just so happens that my particular talents and this particular disaster and the proximity of Haiti made it a time where obviously this was something I needed to do. I don’t believe in coincidences and I had those two weeks off. I already had a connection to Haiti. I love the people there. I could not not go.” White has been to Haiti before on medical missions with Jaffrey’s Monadnock Bible Conference Center. He also sponsors a Haitian boy who lives at the Monadnock Bible Conference Center’s orphanage in Port-au-Prince.

View Slide Show of photos from Dr. White's Trip (from WMUR.com)

Finding a medical team to join was the hard part, he said. Relief groups were inundated with volunteers. So they had to find a back door route, he said. He and Lupo flew to St. Thomas where they met up with Amanda Earl, a physician assistant, who had worked for White in the past.
“We scrambled, bought as much stuff as we could and went,” he said. In the days leading up to the trip, Lupo went to hospitals all over the state collecting drugs. Oddly enough the only thing they lost in airport security was their peanut butter.

“We probably had $100,000 street value in narcotics. ... And what do they confiscate, our peanut butter.” Once in St. Thomas, White, Lupo and Earl joined a medical team with U.S. Virgin Islands Haiti Relief and traveled to Haiti. As a surgeon at Monadnock Orthopedic Association at the Bond Wellness Center and the Franklin Pierce University team physician, White’s practice focuses on joint replacement and sports medicine. “This time of year we see a lot of snowboarders from Crotched Mountain. We take care of people, whether it’s ATV or motorcycle or a car accidents or a grandmother fell and busted her hip.” In Haiti, though, White faced patients with major trauma similar to what you would see on a battlefield, he said.

“Most of what I see is what we might call simple long bone trauma ... most of these people had three or four extremities broken, both arms broken, a pelvis broken, both legs broken. The week before they had one or two partial extremities amputated.” Arriving 10 days after the quake White and Lupo were part of the second wave of physicians, he said. “Before we got there, there were tons of amputations,” he said. “Generally we just don’t see that kind of trauma.”

He spent his first two days performing surgeries. Instruments were limited and difficult to sterilize. “It’s a very different system,” he said. “We don’t have sterile drills. So you take a drill and cover it with sterile gloves.” After two days in surgery, he joined Lupo, who had formed a wound care team.
“If they were able to keep their legs or their arms they had all this Haitian cement embedded in their tissue, which leads to infection. So a lot of what we did was tend to these wounds.”
Lupo performed debridement, which is cleaning the wounds by using a scalpel to cut away dead tissues. “If you did that without anesthesia it would be terribly painful,” he said.

White and Lupo worked at a hospital located in a nice suburb outside of Port-au-Prince, which had no damage from the quake that White could see. The hospital was housing about 200 patients at the hospital that was only built to care for about. Healthcare workers were showing up on a daily basis to join the other medical volunteers, he said. “You’re there to serve. So people just plugged in wherever they could.” The smiles of thankfulness from his patients remain with him, White said. The Haitian people are resilient, he said. “Despite the terrible circumstances they have hope. At this point they don’t have depression or desperation.”

White said he plans to return to Haiti as soon as he can. “I’m hoping to go back in March. I think at this point my skills are needed as an orthopedic surgeon. ... They’ll need orthopedic and other specialist for years to come.”

Article By Meghan Pierce
Monadnock Ledger-Transcript