One of the UJA-NNJ “Heroes of Haiti,” Dr. Joshua Hyman is not new to volunteering his medical services for earthquake victims. As associate director of the Children for China Pediatrics Foundation, he said, he travels to China every year to “provide surgical services to Chinese orphans.” There he treats congenital and post-traumatic deformities in children, but last year he “also took care of about half dozen children who were injured in the [2009 China] earthquake.”

When he learned of the devastation due to the earthquake in Haiti, Hyman quickly arranged his trip, arriving on Jan. 18 for 10 marathon days of surgery and medical treatment of young quake victims. As a pediatric orthopedic surgeon, his skills were particularly essential as he and other team members addressed the needs of children whose limbs were crushed in the rubble of collapsed buildings.

Hyman described how he joined up with other medical professionals of the Florida based Project Medishare facility at the Port-au-Prince airfield, where “four big wedding tents” held operating and other treatment facilities for the victims. During his stay he found the Israeli field hospital personnel very helpful. In order to maximize the use of medical expertise of the Medishare and Israeli physicians, “there was a fair amount of trading of patients” with the Israelis, said Hyman. “I brought patients to the Israeli facility, and brought back patients that they couldn’t manage.”

Hyman encountered challenging cases. “One patient, a 10-year-old girl, had a terrible crush injury to her arm,” said Hyman. “I spent a great deal of time trying to save the arm, and brought her to the Israelis to try to get a plastic surgeon, but they couldn’t help her.” He did manage to get the youngster transferred to a Florida hospital where she could get the needed services. Each day he spent most of his time operating on victims, but Hyman also concerned himself with finding facilities for follow-up treatment of his patients. Hyman succeeded in transferring numerous patients to the U.S.N. Comfort as well as to Florida hospitals for continued treatment.

Hyman found inspiration in “the spirit of the Haitian people who suffered tremendously — physically, spiritually — who lost their homes and businesses, yet in camps and in the hospitals they wanted to help each other.” Many Haitians volunteered as translators, or helped with equipment and patient transfers, said Hyman.

Hyman is associate professor of orthopaedic surgery at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and director of Pediatric Orthopaedic Fellowship at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian. He has lived most of his life in Englewood, where he and his wife are raising their 13-year-old twins, who will celebrate their bar and bat mitzvahs in Israel shortly, and two younger daughters who were adopted from China.

Regarding his Haiti experience, Hyman said, “My wife was completely supportive and my kids just wanted to make sure that I would be safe. They were pleased that their father was involved in trying to help.”

“I’m fortunate that I have the training to do this work,” said Hyman, who plans to return to Haiti to organize rehabilitative care and to help amputees acquire the prostheses they so desperately need. He is also planning a trip to China in the fall to continue his medical volunteer work there.

“The need for additional support in Haiti is tremendous and it will be ongoing,” concluded Hyman. “A tragedy as great as this, very, very close to home, will have to stay in the minds of people in the U.S.”

Dr. Guy Lin wants to adopt this 5-year-old girl whose parents died in the earthquake. COURTESY DR. LIN

Dr. Guy Lin struggled to explain why, after January’s devastating earthquake in Haiti, he dropped everything to accompany Israel’s medical team of mercy.

“I am head of the trauma unit at the Western Galilee Hospital in Nahariya,” he began after pondering the question. “Every physician thinks he can do his job the best, but in Nahariya, if I am not there, many others could replace me. In Haiti, I felt that there was nobody else.

Lin, who served as chief surgeon at the Israeli mobile field hospital set up in Port-au-Prince, is scheduled to be the guest speaker for UJA Federation of Northern New Jersey’s Physicians & Dentists annual dinner on May 11. The event will pay tribute to 25 “heroes of Haiti,” local medical professionals who also volunteered their services in the wake of the disaster. Many are associated with local hospitals, including Englewood Hospital and Medical Center, Hackensack University Medical Center, Holy Name Medical Center, St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center, and The Valley Hospital.

Cathi Goldfischer, a nurse at Englewood, nurse-practitioner at a private practice in Ramsey, and chief of the Fort Lee Ambulance Corps, went to Haiti with the state-sponsored New Jersey-1 Disaster Medical Assistance Team of 35 professionals.

“Haiti was our first appointment overseas,” said Goldfischer, the team’s head nurse. The volunteers arrived on Friday and waited at the American embassy for a few days before being picked up by a Coast Guard helicopter and brought to a makeshift clinic. Later, they moved operations to a mobile hospital staffed by the 82nd Airborne Division.

“We saw hundreds of patients a day for 17 days,” said Goldfischer. “The sheer magnitude of the physical devastation was just unbelievable.” The team hired local translators and paid them in MRE (military Meals Ready to Eat) and bottled water. They also hired wet nurses to feed babies who were orphaned or whose mothers were too dehydrated to breastfeed. “We did great work and the people were so grateful for any type of care.”

Goldfischer said she was impressed with the Israelis, who landed in Haiti and set up their hospital in just four hours. “I was absolutely in awe. As we were sitting in the embassy, we watched this and somebody on my team said we should throw out our playbook and use theirs instead,” said Goldfischer. “I felt so proud.”

Lin had participated in Israel’s disaster relief effort after the 2001 earthquake in India that claimed some 20,000 lives. However, that experience was much different.

“In India, there was containment of the situation by the local government, and not all infrastructure was destroyed,” explained Lin. “We functioned more like a community hospital than like a disaster hospital. In Haiti, we felt alone. There were about 12 medical delegations in Port-au-Prince and we had the highest level of facilities. We had to decide ourselves what to do, and for a few days we had nowhere to transfer patients.”

Lin spent 23 years in the Israel Defense Force’s Medical Corps as a combat surgeon for paratrooper and Special Forces units. He commanded the advanced medical course at the School of Military Medicine and headed the IDF Trauma Branch, training physicians to treat combat injuries. He went on to be Chief Surgeon of the IDF Northern Command.

Yet Lin claimed that what he saw in Haiti “was the worst sight I have ever seen in my life. I would grab an hour’s sleep, and afterwards I would think, ‘How did I allow myself to waste time sleeping? I could have saved another life in that hour.’ You feel like every minute of your time equals someone’s life or someone’s quality of life.”

Lin was moved by the gratitude he heard. “Almost every patient said, ‘God bless Israel’ or ‘Thank you, Israel,’ and they cried from emotion. They really appreciated us.”

In addition to his address at the UJA dinner, to take place at 6:30 at Teaneck’s Marriott Glenpointe, Lin will make clinical presentations to trauma and emergency personnel at local hospitals.

His appearance in North Jersey was arranged by Robert Miller, director of the UJA Physicians & Dentists Division. Miller had been disappointed to discover that none of the field hospital veterans was available through organized speaker channels.

“I called Hadassah, I called Shaare Zedek, I called the IDF spokesperson’s office — I made many calls to Israel, but came up with nothing,” related Miller. Then, on a hunch, he called his Israeli colleague from the UJA-NNJ Partnership 2000 project in the northern city of Nahariya. “I asked her if anybody from Western Galilee had gone to Haiti. And within 15 minutes, we had Dr. Lin.”

Miller said he was moved by the photos Lin sent him from his time in Haiti, showing the surgeon with children. “He’s got incredible medical credentials. But this shows what a great Jew he is, too.”

Lin said that Israel’s decision to send disaster relief teams all over the world is made at the political level and he could only speculate as to why the small country, itself in a constant state of alert, is always among the first to send help.

“I want to believe the reason is that as a Jewish country you cannot stand and do nothing when other nations are in trouble,” he said. “Maybe there are other considerations involved, but this is my feeling.”

Dr. Howard Zucker examins one of the children in the orphanage. COURTESY DR. ZUCKER

Dr. Howard Zucker of Cliffside Park recently returned from a week in Haiti, where he used his skills as anesthesiologist and pediatrician to bring sorely needed services to earthquake victims. “It’s very sad,” he said. “It’s amazing how one event could impact every single person you cross paths with.” The Jan. 12 earthquake was estimated to have killed over 200,000, injured hundreds of thousands of others, and left a million people homeless. The magnitude 7 quake destroyed or hopelessly damaged hundreds of thousands of residences and commercial buildings.

Zucker did not join the rescue efforts immediately after the disaster; he understood that weeks and months later there would still be enormous need for medical assistance. “The situation is still difficult,” he said. “In a couple of months the need will still be there. It’s important that people recognize that the needs persist.”

Zucker, who has M.D., J.D. and L.L.M. degrees, has a résumé that could describe the accomplishments of several busy professionals. Graduating high school at 15, college at 19, and George Washington University Medical School at age 22, Zucker has worked at Yale University School of Medicine, MIT, and the National Institutes of Health, and ran the pediatric intensive care unit at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He served in the U.S. government under Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson and worked for the World Health Organization, in charge of health technology and pharmaceuticals. Last spring he led a study group on global health diplomacy at Harvard Kennedy School. He is currently senior advisor in the Division of Global Health and Human Rights at Massachusetts General Hospital. He has combined his medical and legal training to develop and improve health policy and the quality of health care in the U.S. and worldwide.

During his week of volunteering in Haiti, Zucker spent most of his time at Sacre Coeur Hospital in Milot, about 70 miles north of Port-au-Prince, where many victims had been airlifted. The 73-bed facility became one of the busiest hospitals in Haiti after the quake because it did not sustain damage, and also had a system in place for rehabilitation and recovery of patients.

The crisis in Haiti involves “individuals whose lives are completely upside down. Their lives are still upside down,” said Zucker. Even before the earthquake Haiti’s millions of impoverished people did not have access to modern medical services.

“Haiti is not that far from southern Florida, yet there’s such a difference in resources,” Zucker noted. “The situation was quite challenging before the earthquake. I want to figure out how to improve public health in Haiti.”

The doctor described some of the cases he faced. “There was a child with marked hydrocephaly — water on the brain. In the U.S. they would have put a shunt in long, long before the child was [in] as bad [shape]. We had a discussion about what to do.” When hydrocephaly is treated early in infants, most babies will recover with no long-term damage. But the Haitian child had no access to treatment and had already suffered serious brain damage.

“This was an ethical discussion that would never occur in the U.S. The decision was to send the kid to an orphanage and not do anything medically,” said Zucker. If they had intervened at that point there were no mechanisms to follow up on the severely disabled child.

Zucker was deeply touched by another case — that of a 3-month-old baby girl who had been buried in the rubble for four days. “It was unbelievable,” he said, “that you could survive buried under for so long.” All the family members apparently had been killed in the quake, leaving the little girl the lone survivor. “She’s doing pretty well,” he added. “There were other amazing stories of survival there as well.”

Another young patient inspired Zucker with her courage and optimism. “I saw a little girl sitting in the tent. She was cute — with braided hair, and a big smile on her face. She lost her leg, but still had the ability to get a smile,” he said. “This is something that kids in America should see. The [Haitian children] have the ability to find joy in many small things.”

Zucker and others have noted that Haitians suffer from a range of health problems. “Everybody has high blood pressure,” he said. “Either it’s the stress or some other factor or combination of factors. The chronic level of hypertension leads to a shorter life expectancy.”

Zucker also reported that “the people looked so much older than their years — more worn.”

“The poverty in the community — how do you fix all that? We did surgeries and procedures and you try to do what you can. But they need follow up.” He explained that as teams of medical volunteers left they passed the patients on to the next group of volunteers and hoped for the best.

Zucker’s tremendous record of achievement includes working on crises such as the anthrax attacks in the United States and developing the “Afghan Family Health Book” to improve public health literacy for millions of Afghanis.

But he is particularly proud of his work in the development of the Medical Reserve Corps. Zucker arrived in Washington, D.C., on September 4, 2001, as a White House Fellow — just a few days before the 9/11 attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. Shortly after the attacks, Zucker proposed the Medical Reserve Corps, a program to bring doctors and nurses together in cooperative groups to help Americans in times of crisis. “Doctors and nurses in the same community don’t know each other,” he explained. “The program provides the opportunity for all the health professionals to work together.”

“The proposal was given to Secretary Thompson who sent it to President Bush, and he loved it,” said Zucker. The program started off with $10 million and 10 pilot programs involving 1,000 volunteers. “Now it has expanded to 900 programs with 200,000 American volunteers, in every state of the union. It’s a major program run out of the Surgeon General’s Office.”

Bergen County was among the first 10 program sites. Some examples of the joint projects include addressing diabetes and obesity in children and combating smoking in junior high school students.

Zucker speculated on how to address inequities in resources, poverty in developing nations, and responses to catastrophes. “I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the developing world,” he noted. “Is it the role of the public sector? The private sector? Wealthy nations? Just the U.S.? Things are changing. Now everyone feels an obligation.”

Zucker’s career includes decades of improving medical services all over the world. His work with the World Health Organization brought him to 70 countries. “My job with the WHO involved parts of the world where there are no resources at all,” he said. “Having traveled the whole world, you wonder how on one planet there can be such a discrepancy in resources.”

“I tend to be an optimist,” he added, “believing that if you want to push things forward you can.”

Although Zucker has been to 70 countries on his medical missions, Israel was not one of them. “There are many other areas where there was more need,” he said, noting that medical personnel from Israel joined volunteers from other countries helping the survivors in Haiti. Zucker was particularly impressed by reports about the Israeli field hospital in Port-au-Prince. “In the future if there were another disaster,” he said, “I would ask them if I could join their team.”

Zucker said that news coverage on the Internet and cable stations puts people more in touch with disasters and their aftermaths. “The only worry” about such widespread coverage, he added, “is that we don’t want people to get saturated and stop giving.”