"I need a break," sighs Jim Guest, a 50-year-old neurosurgeon from Florida, who was in Haiti with a group called Medishare -- the team for which Parker was interpreting. "I need some sleep. I have to unburden myself." And then? "Then I will come back," he promises.
Guest usually operates on brains, a highly specialized branch of medicine. In Port-au-Prince, however, he had to carry out very different, cruder operations. "We had 350 to 400 patients and approximately 100 amputations. But we hardly had the proper instruments. We had to make do. We used belts as tourniquets, and once we used a red water hose."
"We're beat," says Joe Mackey, a 46-year-old anesthetist from Boston. Mackey tells of the medieval methods he had to use on patients because of the lack of supplies in two operating tents. They had neither the proper anesthetic nor oxygen. So they used ketamine, a local anesthetic that is...