EAST MEADOW- Working 21 hour days, with access to nothing other than Power Bars, and freeze dried food to eat on your infrequent  5 minute breaks … Sleeping in a sleeping bag for the couple hours a night that you actually could sleep…   And wearing the same clothes all day, everyday… and barely finding the time or the resources to take a shower. It sounds like a union member’s worst nightmare. But, that wasn’t so for Yuwanna Landau of Nassau University Medical Center. She actually welcomed it when she visited Haiti three weeks after the devastating earthquake that hit on February 12.

 

Landau, a Nurse Practitioner, in the Division of Infectious Diseases, has been at NUMC for 10 years. She was born in Haiti, and left when she was fifteen, approximately 39 years ago. And she has not been there since.   “The country I saw when I got there, was not the one that I left,” Landau said. 

 

In fact, Landau did not get to see much of the country anyway. She went with an organization called Our Chance International (OCI) which was part of a Medishare Project Program out of the University of Miami. She was part of a group of five people which included ER doctors and nurses and herself. When she got there, there was a large medical tent set up at the airport with Intensive Care Units and Operating Rooms, and that was where she stayed for 7 days.  

“It was like a scene out of the show M.A.S.H.,” she said. “Except this was real.” And very real it was. Landau witnessed 2 people who died of tetanus because of dirty wounds that were unvaccinated, as well as several others during that week.

 

“I couldn’t even let that affect me. There were so many other people that needed help and we had to stay focused the whole time,” she said. And she had to work in a number of different areas including Pediatrics, Adult, Paraplegic, Triage, Wound Care and Pharmacy, while translating languages. Landau speaks both Spanish and French, in addition to English. 

 

The strong emotional attachment of the families was something that really hit home, Landau said. Part of the culture is a very tight-knit family atmosphere, and that was exemplified in a situation where a young man was paralyzed from the waist down, and he wasn’t screaming, but his wife was.

 

As bad as all of this sounds, Landau said the worst part were the spontaneous decisions that had to be made. Whether it be prioritizing whose victim’s injury was worse, and who had to be cared for first, or who had to get the last dose of morpheine. The oxygen was portable, had to be continually switched, and it was only good for one hour at a time. There were just so many variables, and so little time to decide things. Landau compared it to when she started her career working in a hospice. 

 

After spending a week there, and it was finally time to come home, even though Haiti is roughly 3-4 hours away via plane, it took her 16 hours to get home. She got home via a C-17 cargo plane where she sat on the floor the whole time.

Landau still has her father’s sister and a couple of nieces in Haiti, but fortunately none of them were physically harmed from the earthquake. She does plan on going back to help, and wants to visit other countries once per year to help provide medical care to those who don’t have it. 

 

Through all this, Landau is a breast cancer survivor for six years, and runs and walks for different charities on an almost weekly basis, including a recent Run for Haiti in New York City that drew nearly 10,000 attendees. She also ran the New York City Marathon in 2008.

 

Once she got home, and back with her family, Landau finally got the chance to let the trip sink in, and get an idea of what impact she made there, as well as what impact it had on her.

 

“I really just realized how people take so many things for granted here,” Landau said. Medical care is guaranteed at places like NUMC, but over there it wasn’t and finding the resources and the manpower to keep people alive was always a challenge. 

 

She finished by saying, “It was definitely a life changing experience, and something I will never forget.”