Originally headed to India to join hospital rotations for fourth-year electives, Amit Joshi, Anish Sheth and Jason Slosberg adjusted their schedules to spend a week helping patients in a makeshift international Red Cross center in the flattened city of Bhuj
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Amit Joshi, Anish Sheth and Jason Slosberg (left) arrived in Bhuj about two weeks after the Jan. 26 quake. The Red Cross hospital sat on the grounds of Lalan College, crushed by the tremors. In desert-like Bhuj, temperatures reached 100 degrees during the day, dropping to 40 degrees at night. The earthquake is thought to have killed 20,000 people and injured 166,000. It destroyed more than a million homes and reduced hundreds of villages to rubble.
The students provided both pre- and postoperative care to surgical patients, most of who had undergone orthopedic operations or amputations. Joshi, who speaks Hindi, and Sheth, who speaks Gujarati, helped translate for three European surgeons. The surgeons were overwhelmed with 220 patients, and did not speak the patients’ language.
Along with Slosberg, the students also provided triage, helped control pain, moved diagnostic tests along and even handled certain medical emergencies. Cleaning, closing and managing wounds took up a fair share of their time.
Sheth and Slosberg worked in three tents, helping 60 patients. Joshi worked in two tents, helping 40 patients. They took medical histories and gathered critical medical information for the three surgeons.
The students treated patients ranging in age from 6 to 95. Family members played important roles, acting as nurses at the staff-strapped facility. At night, family members slept on the ground alongside patients (left). Some had nowhere else to go.
The students slept in sleeping bags in tents and ate in mess tents, all provided by the Red Cross. Traveling light, they had reached Bhuj lacking basic personal-care items such as a change of clothes or toiletries.
The experience was much more than the students had expected from their initial plans to visit India for four- to six-week rotations to observe diseases and illnesses normally not encountered in the United States.
"At times, we weren’t helping the medical team, we were the medical team," Slosberg said.
Their lasting impression is of the elevated morale of patients and families.
"It’s really hard to explain the devastation," said Sheth. "Entire sections of Bhuj were completely wiped out. Patients had lost limbs, family members and homes. But they would sit up when we walked into the tents, smile and remain in good spirits."
Every year, Joshi visits his family in India and works in the hospitals. "Indian patients are always like that," he said. "Still, we were struck by how pure the interaction was. I will never forget these patients."
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n about a month, the three students will leave medical school. Joshi will become a resident in general surgery at New York Presbyterian Hospital (Cornell campus). Sheth is headed for an internal medicine residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. For the next year, Slosberg will pursue a business opportunity in industrial supplies. Then he will seek a plastic surgery residency."Especially because I’m taking time off, the experience reminded me of why I went into medicine," Slosberg said. "It was for the intimacy with patients and for wanting to help people in a profound way. It was an extremely powerful experience for me."
Joshi agreed. "For Anish and myself it was especially profound to help our own people. It was Indians helping Indians."
After their week in Bhuj, the students participated in hospital rotations elsewhere in India. They returned home in mid to late March.
Soon after arriving, Sheth traveled to Atlanta to present research findings at the national meeting of the American College of Physicians and the American Society of Internal Medicine. He made the all-expenses-paid trip as winner of the prestigious National Student Clinical Vignette Competition. At the meeting, Sheth gave an oral presentation about his study of a rare cause of gastrointestinal bleeding.