Fo Pye

Today was one of those days that make it all worthwhile! Almost everyone went home happy! This was the day that the crew from Mercer, U in Atlanta came with the prosthetic legs that we measured for a week or so ago. The patients were all here at 8:00 am, even most of the ones who were told to come after lunch. Two teams went to work, wrapping legs, then putting together a plastic form, padding it with foam, wrapping it with an outer layer like a knee brace fabric, then screwing on a pipe with a foot at the bottom. Then the patients stood up, with a too long leg, took a few steps to really set the stump into the leg, and the leg was adjusted to fit. The first couple of patients had a little trouble with their first few steps, but the waiting patients encouraged them on, and most people were able to take a few steps almost immediately. After 4 months without a foot at the bottom of your leg, an artificial leg feels heavy, but the doctors said that within a few days, the extra weight will not be noticeable.

Surprisingly, the younger patients were no quicker than the older patients in learning to walk again. Success seemed to depend more on determination than on strength or balance. The oldest patient was 85, a spunky woman, who was very vocal in getting her leg attached and adjusted before she stood on it. But she never got tired once she started walking. And, instead of taking the wheelchair ride to the front door, she insisted on walking!

One younger man, built like a football player, had no trouble at all. He stood up, walked across the room, and asked if he could drive home. He is a driver for a company here in Leogane. The doctor made him promise that he wouldn’t drive before he came back tomorrow for a recheck. But this man wanted a cover for his pipe and foot. When the doctor said that there was no cover, the man started taking off his sock from his good foot, and then began unlacing the shoe from his artificial foot. We explained that he must wear a shoe on the artificial foot because it would wear out, but he continued to unlace his shoe. We waited, and saw what he was doing. He put the sock from his good foot over the artificial foot (which was a white foot), then put the shoe back on the artificial foot. Turns out that he, being black, didn’t want the white foot to show. When I said that the group should bring black feet next time, they said that they had never seen a black prosthesis. Surely, this can’t be true!

What did I do during all of this? I typed consent forms that had been stolen earlier in the trip, set up the room, told everyone around the hospital to look for one legged patients and send them back to the pediatric rooms of the unopened part of the hospital. I comforted an old man who was confused and in the wrong place, found walkers and wheelchairs for those patients who needed them. At one point we needed another translator, so I asked a young man who was clearing trash out of a room to help translate. He was embarrassed because his flip-flop was broken and he was only wearing one shoe. When we needed him to go with a patient to another hospital, I gave him my pair of tennis shoes. I’ll get another pair from a visitor who plans to leave their shoes here in Haiti.

The only hard part of the day was telling the last patient that his stump was too short to fit a ‘fo pye’ (artificial foot) onto. He will need to have the knee removed and let the stump heal before he can get a prosthesis with a knee that bends. I thought he would be terribly unhappy, but his immediate question was, ‘Where can I get the surgery done, and who can help me pay for it?’ And, as the Lord so often provides, we happen to have a Japanese orthopedic surgeon with the group staying in the guesthouse for two more weeks. We will try to get everyone together tomorrow, to see how we can have a Japanese doctor amputate the leg of a Haitian in an American hospital, so a Vietnamese doctor in a University research center can fit him with an artificial leg! What a satisfying job I have!