Local Doctor Aids Relief Effort in Haiti

February 22, 2010

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DR. BILLY FORD (RIGHT) AND HIS TWO BROTHERS TAKE A BREAK WHILE WORKING WITH PATIENTS IN HAITI FOLLOWING THE EARTHQUAKE

By JEANMARIE EVELLY

It had been over a decade since Dr. Billy Ford, an anesthesiologist at St. Barnabas Hospital, last visited Haiti, the country where he was born and raised.

But when he got news of the catastrophic earthquake that struck his homeland on Jan. 12—he was sitting in on his children’s piano lessons and heard about the quake through an e-mail message—he knew he’d be going back.

“I need to get over there and make a difference,” he recalled thinking to himself while watching footage of the devastation on television. Within a week, he’d arrived at the airport in Port Au Prince, where three tents made a makeshift hospital for the hundreds of patients there in need of medical care.

Ford, 47, is the director of anesthesiology at St. Barnabas Hospital, where he’s worked since 2001. Born in Haiti, he lived there until he was 10 years old, before moving to Brooklyn. He lived in Park Slope and Crown Heights as one of nine brothers and sisters. Two of his brothers, Jean and Henri, are also doctors who joined him in Haiti as part of the relief effort.

The earthquake struck an especially personal cord with the Ford brothers—not only is Haiti their hometown, but one of their sisters still lives in the country, where she works as the principal of an American school.

After a series of frantic phone calls to make sure their sister was safe (she is), the brothers started planning a way to get to Haiti to help. They travelled with Project Medishare, a nonprofit based in Miami, FL. Ford arrived the Friday following the quake, and stayed for a week.

“You just got there, you landed in Haiti and there was nobody to tell you where to go or what to do,” Ford said. “It was nerve-wracking.”

But his anxieties were relieved once he got to work, he said. Tents were set up around the airport, where patients waited on cots for care. Ford used his anesthesiology expertise to help sedate and comfort patients who needed bone fractures set, dressings changed on painful wounds or limbs amputated.

The amputations were all too common.

“That was very sad,” Ford said. “They’re going to have a society with a lot of kids who will never get to play soccer.”

The amount of rebuilding that needs to be done is overwhelming, Ford said. Major institutions—including the city’s medical school—were entirely destroyed, as were 250,000 homes, according to the Haitian government.

“You had a lot of whole families staying on one cot,” Ford described. “A lot of people, when you were going to release them, asked, ‘Where am I going to go?’”

Ford and his brothers will continue to stay active in the relief effort, and hope to plan another visit to Haiti at some point. The week he spent there was life changing, he said.

“What struck me was that, in light of this whole tragedy, a lot of people were still thankful,” Ford said. “They were praying. The Haitian people are resilient. Throughout all of this, their spirit was not broken at all.”

“I see the whole world differently now,” he said.

Written by admin · Filed Under Health & Environment, Latest, News/Features 

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