By Tim Bullard

Staff Writer

tbullard@yadkinripple.com

 

A local nurse recently went to Haiti to assist with emergency services, and her work brought her face to face with former Sen. John Edwards.

Junellyn Fortner, a nurse at Hoots Memorial Hospital, is 62, and she loves her job. Her job lets her in exotic locales during hard conditions after disasters.  She lives in Moravian Falls.

A native of Cincinnati, Ohio, she got into nursing when she got out of high school. She wanted to join the Peace Corps out of high school.

“My dad said no way,” she said. “I went to nursing school because I had worked as a Candystriper. That was my interest, medicine.”

“I do a lot of mission work. I have been to Africa after the flood and Mozambique. I have been in Honduras after the hurricane. I was in Sri Lanka after the tsunami hit. So I do a lot of disaster relief work with the N.C. Baptists. They set up a 24-hour response team.

“There are Hungarian doctors. Rescue 24 is what it was called. It’s kind of a global thing where the Hungarians and the N.C. Baptists work together to send people in after huge disasters with medical relief. They had a team up going to Haiti. I volunteered, and I called them and told them I’d be glad to go.

“The hospital’s been real gracious about it. At a moment’s notice they let me off to go. Plus they gave me all kind of supplies to take. The hospitals there, most of them were destroyed. We loaded it all up. We were suppose to fly in on a C1-30. We went into the Dominican Republic and took a 12-hour bus trip through the mountains to get to Port-A-Prince.

“Oh my goodness. The conditions were primitive at best. When we got into Haiti, it was a disaster of unbelievable magnitude,” she said. “There were head injuries, spine injuries in Haiti and crush injuries. I went in January. We were just in time for maggots to start crawling and infections to start up.

“There were thousands of people lined up in rows. We set up a hospital. There was a main hospital in town that was small and very primitive conditions that was still intact. They divided up teams. The Hungarian doctors and an X-ray tech and a paramedic went with them. We had on our team two orthopedic surgeons, me and another lady from Baptist Hospital and two paramedics from Murphy.

“We went to a little Catholic children’s hospital for malnourished, St. Damien’s. We set up a hospital there. It was a tiny hospital. Our American orthopedic surgeon set up a little O.R. We proceded to start doing amputations. Oh my God, we had a nurse antheticicist who was from Mississippi. He was doing sedations.

“It was primitive sedations.  It was nothing. There was no pain medication. No IV pumps. Everything you had to do, you have to hang. If you could find lines to start IVs on people, you’d get them ready for an amputation in a little primitive room, and you’d scrub down with wipes to make it sanitary enough to do these surgeries.

“It was unimaginable. It was like on the warfront on the front lines. The only thing different was nobody was shooting at you. There were hundreds of people lined up with loved ones, hurt themselves. They were just mobbed in the front of this hospital. We were throwing up tarps for people to get out of the sun because those people had no water. They had no food.

“They were bringing in little bags of water for us, and how can you drink or take a drink of water when you have people standing in front of you who haven’t had anything to drink in days? It’s been three months, and I have the shingles right now from the stress that it caused. It’s just something that you can’t imagine. Kids screaming. Legs were being amputated.

“Kids were getting both legs amputated, an arm and a leg. A child might come out with no legs or one leg. When they had an amputation, they went home with the parent. You couldn’t put them in a room and take care of them for three days. They went home. The orthopedic surgeons were doing the best they could do. I just can’t describe it.

“There was nothing that could be done. They hadn’t done anything with head injuries or spinal cord injuries. We didn’t have a neurosurgeon. The Israelis had set a tent up outside of a place where we were and some Italians had come in and were helping too.

“After we had been there two days, I set up a room for spinal cord injuries. One of the paramedics was working with me. Then finally the nurse that was from Baptist came over and she was working with me too. About the second day that we were there John Edwards came in.

“You might work 24 hours and go lay down and rest a little while, get back up and start again. Some of us were working 36 hours without sleep. I didn’t recognize him. Every day there were tremors, 4.3. This guy comes walkin’ in the room and goes, ‘How ya doin?’

“There was some guy with him with a camera. I looked up at him. I said, ‘How do you think I’m doing, you know?’ I was irritated. Here’s all these people who are injured, and you’re trying to help them and give them medicine under the most primitive of conditions.

“I had literally burst out crying when he came in and asked me that. He just left. About two hours later, he came back and asked me what could he do and that he wanted to do something to help. I told him, I said what you can do to help is get some of these kids out of here so they can have a life.

“We already had people who were getting pressure, laying for five days without moving and already had rotted flesh. He said well, ‘I will do something.’ In two more hours they told me John Edwards was getting my patients moved out to get my patients ready and loaded up.

“Well these people, closed and open injuries, we loaded them on little stretchers and put them on the back of a flat-bed ton truck. We transportated them out to the Army headquarters with a M.A.S.H. unit. Miami Hospital was with them. He had a C-130 come in. Over two days we got about 25 people transported.

“There were drugs that countries were shipping up, but they were packed up in boxes. They put a Haitian guy who spoke English in charge of it. he would try to pull out a medicine if he could find it or I.V. tubing or needles.”

As far as being able to go give someone a shot of Demerol, they didn't have it.

"All day long you were hearing these kids screaming. I had a little boy who had a fractured pelvis. It perforated between the rectum and scrotum, and the bones were sticking out. This kid was nine years old. There was no pain medication. He laid there in my room, and he started crying. I asked this man who could speak English what was the matter."

Describing the situation is still hard for her.

"He said he needed to go to the bathroom. This little boy with a fractured pelvis, rolled over on his hands and knees and got up to go to the bathroom with this open wound," she said, crying. "We were there for nine days all together and we probably saw 250 people a day."