Three-year-old Stefi Pierre giggles with delight as she uses her new artificial leg to launch a soccer ball across the room — a joyful moment with foreign aid workers that masks the uncertain future for her and thousands of other amputees in Haiti.
The girl’s wobbly, shuffling steps are her first on a difficult road to recovery in a temporary rehabilitation center treating victims of the Jan. 12 earthquake, which left Haiti overwhelmed with amputees like Stefi. She and others who lost limbs, some with multiple amputations, now face the practical realities of struggling for survival in a devastated Haiti as well as a social stigma in a country that has never been kind to the handicapped.
Stefi’s mother, Fabian Pierre, said she was more worried about her daughter being shunned than the surgery she would need soon to correct her rushed amputation.
“Once she goes to school, it’s going to be an issue,” Pierre said. “Some people will have a problem with it.”
As many as 4,000 people had amputations from the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that the Haitian government said killed an estimated 230,000. Those who lost limbs need elaborate follow-up treatment because the surgeons, rushing to save as many lives as possible, often made “guillotine” amputations: a straight cut through flesh and bone that did not leave enough skin for proper healing or cushion for an artificial limb, said Bob Horton, a nurse with Merlin, a British nonprofit medical aid group.
Some wounds are infected from inadequate follow-up treatment, an agonizing situation for the often-homeless survivors as well as the foreign and Haitian doctors and nurses who treat them.
While many amputees, including Stefi, remain hospitalized, others have been discharged with nowhere to go but squalid shantytowns, the so-called temporary settlement camps that are home to 600,000 people in the quake zone.
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