Fla. Doctors Describe Puerto Rico Conditions: `It Changed My Life`

Orlando Sentinel

Oct. 10—One week after Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico, a team of Florida Hospital doctors flew to the island to assist its overwhelmed health care system.

What the physicians saw changed their lives forever.

After landing in San Juan, the team—Dr. Katia Lugo, Dr. Jorge Lopez, Dr. Alfredo Tirado, Dr. William Kotler and Dr. Julian Trivino—made its way to a hospital in Aguadilla, a coastal city in the northwestern corner of the island.

Doctors and nurses there had been working for six days straight. During the storm, some had lost everything except the clothes on their backs.

The situation was dire: The day the team arrived, the hospital directors were considering shutting the facility down. The temperature inside the 30-bed emergency room had reached 95 degrees.

"When we arrived, the hospital itself was just hemorrhaging morale," Trivino said at a news conference Monday after returning from a two-week stay on the island.

Immediately, the doctors went to work, saving the life of a woman who had gone into cardiac arrest the moment the group arrived.

"The first one was kind of miraculous," Lopez said, describing the Orlando physicians and their Puerto Rican counterparts as an orchestra playing a symphony without practice.

Over their two-week stay, the team traveled via Blackhawk helicopter to more than a dozen towns in the mountainous and rural parts of the island most devastated by the storm, directly and indirectly treating too many patients to count.

The hardest part, the physicians said, was seeing patients with chronic conditions—who would have lived under normal circumstances—suffer.

"That's something that really touched me," Tirado said. "Maybe in other conditions, in other settings, these people didn't have to suffer or die."

The official death toll on the island is 34, but the doctors said they expect that number to rise as communication lines are re-established and bodies are accurately tallied.

Adding to the stress, most of the doctors are native Puerto Ricans and still have relatives living on the island. As doctors often do, the team had to put the safety and security of their own families in the back of their minds while they focused on the task at hand.

"As emergency medicine doctors, it's what we do," said Kotler, who has an aunt and uncle living in Ponce, about a two-hour drive from San Juan.

Kotler got a transfer to a hospital in Ponce so he could check on his family. He was able to stay in their house for only five minutes—just long enough to see they were OK.

While a second group of Florida Hospital doctors is already on the island, the original team is making preparations to go back and help in the upcoming weeks and months.

"This is going to be a long journey," Lugo said. "And we plan on being there as long as they need us."