Dr. Charles Blitzer is an orthopedic surgeon on the Seacoast – except when he lends his expertise to other parts of the world. He’s worked in rural parts of Malawi, in east Africa; Bhutan in Asia, and Haiti, following the devastating earthquake there.
Blitzer has just returned from three weeks in Nepal, where he treated some of those affected in the massive earthquakes there. He joined Weekend Edition to talk about some of his experiences.
On how quickly he got word that he might be needed in Nepal:
“Thursday evening I got [an email saying] can you leave in 48 hours, but still not clear that I was actually going… it wasn’t until Friday lunch where I actually had about a 90 second conversation with a gal with International Medical Corps in DC saying, yeah, we want you to leave, and can you leave tomorrow? We packed up Friday night and I left Saturday afternoon.”
On the work he did while in Nepal:
“I was deployed with the mobile medical unit. Monday during the day was going to hospitals in Kathmandu; Tuesday morning [we] went on about a four to five hour drive to a small city called Gorka, outside of Kathmandu. I spent the next three days in a couple of very small villages that had been extremely decimated, like 90 percent of the village was flattened. We were running clinics – trying to look after the villagers, and also very much assess what their needs were at that point, which was about 10 days after the first earthquake. Nobody had been up to these villages, so it was a matter of assessing what was going on.”
On the second earthquake that hit:
“I was back down, associated with Patan Hospital, which is about the third biggest hospital in Nepal. It’s about a 500 bed hospital in Kathmandu… I was talking to the director of the International Medical Corps mission in the hotel lobby when the hotel started shaking. It was an experience – I’d never been in an earthquake before – and went running out of the building like virtually everybody else.
“Everybody was immediately on their cell phones, checking on family. The ground was still moving; it felt to me like being on a boat. As soon as things started to settle down from that, we went back to the hospital. The second quake, which was 7.3, damaged the hospital structurally enough so that we were no longer able to use their operating room.
“They were, and they still are, operating in a tent outside, which was quite remarkable. I did a little bit of surgery in a tent setup in Haiti, but this tent at Patan Hospital had no air conditioning. Kathmandu is very hot this time of year, and trying to operate in tent where it’s about 95 degrees is an interesting challenge to your endurance.”
On whether Nepal may see the same long-term difficulties in rebuilding that Haiti saw after its 2010 earthquake:
“I am tremendously more optimistic about Nepal… It’s a big difference in terms of the number of people [killed]. And when I was in Haiti, I was there four months after the earthquake. There were many areas [where] you wouldn’t really have known it hadn’t happened two days ago, given the amount of destruction, cleanup and so forth. In Nepal, in ten days, I saw more of a feeling of people gathering together, starting the rebuilding process. It was very encouraging on that side. I also think, fundamentally, Nepal is a country with a more developed infrastructure and better ability to deal with such a disaster.
“The head of orthopedics at Patan Hospital is a physician named Nabiz, who I was – and am – tremendously impressed with. He was operating at the hospital after the first quake, when one of the major aftershocks hit. His team was about to run out of the OR, and he said, no, that’s just me pushing on the table. You guys stay here. He went home for about half an hour two days later to have dinner with his wife and two young children, but other than that one meal he was at the hospital for seven days straight. He was in the operating room again when this second major quake hit and again, people were talking about running out in the middle of fixing a bad fracture. He said, no, you guys stay. I think I’m going to survive; if I survive, you guys survive. Stay here and help finish.
“I just see an energy and expectation that we’re going to get back to life as it was.”
