A mother’s mourning turns to joy

Reporting from Port-Au-Prince, Haiti — 

Rondlie Daniel mourned her baby’s death for five days. She sat outside her flattened home where he was trapped and prayed and cried, until the grief and pain forced her to withdraw and take refuge elsewhere.

“I could not accept the loss,” she said.

Then, on Monday, she received a call from neighbors. They’d seen people rescuing her 8-month-old boy Sunday night. He was alive. He was with doctors.

Mother and baby Matthew were reunited Monday.

“It is a miracle,” she said. “When I look at him I believe in God and I think things will be OK.”

The situation was touch and go when rescuers finally extricated Matthew from the ruins and rushed him to a sprawling field hospital that the Israeli army had established over the weekend in a grassy lot behind an industrial plant.

Israeli doctors who received him said his body was so shrunken by dehydration that they figured him to be half his actual age. He was near death. They had to resuscitate him, fill him with fluids, oxygen and glucose and hope for the best.

Dr. Yuval Levy, who ran to Matthew’s side Sunday night, moments after singing a long-distance happy birthday to his daughter back home, said doctors will soon have to decide whether to amputate the boy’s left leg, which is ridden with gangrene. “He could die from the infection,” he said.

Still, Matthew was alive.

“It is unbelievable,” said Dr. Amit Assa, 44. “Five days without food, water, in this heat. . . . I think it’s one of a kind.”

Matthew lay spread-eagled, bandaged limbs pointing to the four corners, connected to various tubes, in a baby-adapted medical cot. His huge black eyes followed the doctors and nurses who attended him, and gazed at his mother. Incongruously colorful toys, donated, ringed his bedside.

The field hospital, a base for more than 200 medical personnel and search-and-rescue team members, includes enormous olive-green tents for operating rooms and patient wards; smaller blue tents house the men and women, most of whom are part of or with the Israel Defense Forces.

In 48 hours, the workers had delivered four babies, performed about 50 surgeries -- many of them amputations -- and had started to treat the secondary infections and diseases that come from the atrocious conditions in which Haitians are living.

“We have experience with war, but a wounded person is a wounded person, it’s not important from what,” said Dr. Oded Biton. “The magnitude here is different of course, but we have experience with wounded.”

A couple of tents over from baby Matthew, a woman lay in intensive care. She too was rescued late Sunday, but to extract her, an American medical team had to cut off her right arm just below the shoulder.

She spoke periodically, in and out of unconsciousness, but no one knew her name. Doctors said she might not survive.

Next to her, a woman rescued from a restaurant mumbled about the friends she was seated with, all presumably dead.

In another tent was Jacky Des Bois, 22, who was saved after about eight hours trapped in a church, where a wall had crushed his right leg.

“I was sure I would be saved,” he said.

At the gate of the encampment, Kara Hammons, a nurse from Southern California, performed triage, deciding which patients suffered injuries serious enough to gain them admittance to the hospital while treating others on the spot.

Levy, a neonatal expert, said a baby he delivered late Sunday was two months premature, not breathing when born, weighed less than 4 pounds and had minimal pulse. Measuring not 10 inches, the curly-haired baby must live in an incubator for the foreseeable future.

The earthquake, Levy said, might have induced labor.

“An earthquake is a very good stress factor,” he said.

In the world of devastation that is Port-au-Prince today, Levy said he feels like his little unit is the one optimistic spot. It is the beginning of life.

wilkinson@latimes.com