A WALL fell on Paulette Caesar’s abdomen so hard that it cleaved her pelvis in two.

But the seven-month foetus in her womb somehow survived, even as her mother lay outside her ruined house, untreated, for six excrutiating days in one of Port-au-Prince’s poorest ghettos. On Monday – at imminent risk of a fatal haemorrhage – Caesar’s fortunes took a radical change: taken not to a hospital but to a classroom, where she and her unborn baby found themselves in the hands of a team of world-class medical specialists found nowhere else in Haiti.

Caesar was among two dozen patients treated on the first day of a new project run by Haiti’s Heartline Ministries charity: to find injured people who have yet to see any treatment in the “forgotten slums” of Port-au-Prince, and see whether a dream team of US doctors and surgical nurses could undo the damage of a week of neglect.

One doctor remarked: “An ‘open- book’ pelvic fracture is usually fatal to women who aren’t pregnant, let alone to a foetus, so this is quite a survival story. There’s real hope for them both, now. She’s going to need careful bed rest and then a caesarian birth when the time comes.”

Though most didn’t know each other before the clinic was scrambled, three of the four US doctors at the clinic have an adopted Haitian child, and the fourth used to work here. Duty was the draw.

Stacked further against the doctors are the limits of what they could carry from their practices, as they charged over to Haiti at the weekend at their own expense.

So Dr Joe Boyle, a senior emergency room surgeon, set up the surgery in the two rooms Heartline uses to teach sewing to pregnant mothers at their centre in an obscure suburban sidestreet. IV drips are hung by a plastic hangar from one overhead light, and by Scooby wire from the other, and fold-out picnic tables are set up beneath.

Meanwhile, Dr Tami Rice, a senior anaesthetist from Missouri, has no assistant so she deputises a local midwife, who learns to use powerful sedatives to keep patients asleep and alive during surgery on her first day on the job.

After the laborious processing stages at the capital’s General Hospital – so slow that, on Sunday, a photographer had to alert Red Cross volunteers that a woman was dying in the queue – the speed of treatment in this converted suburban house is dizzying.

Announced by a shout of “We’ve got incoming!”, the newest batch of suffering wretches – scooped from the sidewalks of the Simon Pere slum – includes a one-month-old baby girl whose chest is grotesquely swollen by an abscess.

Another has a pair of trousers tied around her chest as a pitiful defence against a crushed spine. Another is Sylvanie le Grand, who has endured almost a full week with a compound fracture in her thigh: a break so horrible that the leg is visibly shorter than the other, and swollen to the size of her waist.

The pretty 18-year-old had been brought to a UN triage centre, but was sent away without treatment because the bone shards had not broken the skin, and she was not considered a life-or- death case.

Le Grand is fully anaesthetised within five minutes of arrival, and – despite no x-ray facility – Boyle is manipulating the bones back into place with his fingers.

“Just watch that!” Rice chuckles, shaking her head. “That’s something you don’t see every day; he’s doing it all by feel.”

Using the muscle of their reputations, the team has done a deal with the nearby Israeli hospital to take the amputations and major surgery patients stabilised at Heartline – on condition that the team takes them back for post-operative care. On the next table, a paediatric emergency room doctor, Jen Halverson, carefully inserts a make-shift valve into the baby’s abscess, and calls out: “We need sterile baby wipes to clean where the baby pooped!”

Yet another experienced doctor, Tom McKnight – a consultant at a Florida military hospital – keeps the pace up by handing Halverson an abdominal surgical pad instead: “These will serve; we don’t got the wipes.”

Halverson says she wants to keep the baby overnight for observation.

When someone points out that the clinic has no inpatient beds, Halverson declares: “Well I guess we do now – this baby’s staying.”

Bewildered at being fussed over after a week of indifference from authorities – and a life of squalor in the ghetto – the baby’s mother, Magalie Francois, 18, has tears running down her cheeks as she says: “This place; its better than the hospitals.”

Where Port-au-Prince’s General Hospital had just three doctors for more than 1000 inpatient beds at one point last week, this classroom triage now has a complement of six full-time medical heavyweights.

Asked if their skills were being wasted at such a small clinic, Boyle said: “Not at all – if you’re saving lives, then you’re in the right place. Also, we can make sure only the people who really need it go to hospital; a heck of a lot can be treated right here. I guess its inevitable we’re going to expand fast – inpatient care is probably next.”

John McHoul, director of Heartline, said the clinic had raised $50000 (nearly R400000) in its first 36 hours of fundraising.

“We saw that there were an awful lot of injured people who hadn’t been treated at all, or who had been, but there was no follow up and therefore dangerous infections,” he said. “This is especially the case with the poorest, out-of- the-way areas. ©The Times