ShareThisCovered in deep, gaping burns from a gas station that exploded during Haiti's earthquake, Eric Louis spent nearly two weeks in the devastated countryside with nothing more than petroleum jelly and water to salve his wounds.
He had no pain medicine for injuries widely considered the most excruciating of all traumas. His singed skin began melting away. Movement became agonizing.
Now Louis is getting the best that modern medicine can offer, as one of four burn patients plucked from the rubble and flown to North Carolina -- three to the N.C. Jaycee Burn Center at University of North Carolina Hospitals and one to Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem.
Louis, 48, had his first surgery this week. Skin from human donors and modified pig tissue were used as temporary patches over the largest and deepest burns.
For most patients facing six weeks of painful burn treatments, the worst would seem to lie ahead.
Not for Louis. Little could rival what he has already endured.
From the moment he pulled into a gas station in Port-au-Prince on the afternoon of Jan. 12, his suffering began. The earthquake sparked an explosion, covering him in flames. Dazed, he staggered to a nearby hospital, but it was in ruins.
When his wife, Yvita, tracked him down by cell phone, she set out to get him to a place where people could help -- or at least get him home.
She walked 10 miles through the devastation and, when she couldn't find him inside the hospital, she climbed on a car and shouted his name until he was found. "She took her husband and went home," said translator Lionel Giordani.
A woman standing about 5 feet tall, Yvita Louis trudged the 10 miles back home bearing her husband on her shoulders. She was careful not to aggravate the wounds on his back, and his arms, and his head, and his legs. His eyelids were singed, his feet dotted with burns.
"For seven days, all she did was put water on the wounds," Giordani said. It was crude therapy, but all that there was aside from Vaseline. Without proper care -- wound treatments, skin grafts, antibiotics, fluid restoration -- the burns burrowed deeper into his flesh, and his damaged skin sloughed and oozed.
A week or so later, a pickup rumbled past the couple's concrete-block house in a Port-au-Prince suburb, Martissant.
It was the first sign of assistance, and the people were from the neighboring Dominican Republic. Yvita Louis ran out of the house, calling, "Help! Help! Help!"
The people in the truck agreed to drive Eric and Yvita Louis nine hours to a hospital in the Dominican Republic. Eric Louis was given basic care, but not the specialized treatment required for severe burns.
A military helicopter then transported the couple to the floating Navy hospital off the coast of Haiti. From there, the Louises were flown to North Carolina.
Yvita Louis said she left three grown children behind -- children she has not seen since the earthquake. She hopes to find them and perhaps move the entire family to the United States.
"It's incomprehensible to imagine what these two individuals went through," said Dr. Bruce Cairns, medical director of the burn center.
For reasons burn doctors cannot explain, Eric Louis has shown no signs of infection in his wounds, but the depth of his burns and the amount of time that has passed since he suffered the injuries have complicated his care.
Cairns said doctors must first patch the open wounds with borrowed tissue, which will ease some pain and begin the healing. Additional surgeries will involve tethering Eric Louis' hands to skin flaps cut at his groin -- a method used to salvage the delicate tendons that are currently exposed at the top of his hands.
He will also face painful procedures to shave swaths of his skin for grafts on the burns, and then difficult exercises to keep damaged limbs from tightening into uselessness.
In the scarring aftermath, life will never be the same for Eric Louis. And for thousands of Haitians left on the island, the same could be said.
"Haiti is completely gone," Yvita Louis said through Giordani.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit The News and Observer of Raleigh, N.C.
