{"id":12515,"date":"2017-10-18T08:58:55","date_gmt":"2017-10-18T14:58:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uchealth.org\/today\/?p=12515"},"modified":"2025-03-07T10:38:31","modified_gmt":"2025-03-07T17:38:31","slug":"after-three-hurricanes-and-six-weeks-uchealth-medical-relief-worker-returns-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uchealth.org\/today\/after-three-hurricanes-and-six-weeks-uchealth-medical-relief-worker-returns-home\/","title":{"rendered":"After three hurricanes and six weeks, UCHealth medical relief worker returns home"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>

Two deadly hurricanes already had hit and now a third was headed right toward the U.S. Virgin Islands, where\u00a0Erin Lennon and other medical relief workers had been trying to help the people of St. Thomas.<\/p>\n

Hurricane Irma had decimated the Caribbean islands. Now Maria was barreling toward them.<\/p>\n

The workers quickly took down the tent they\u2019d set up to serve as a mobile field hospital. It could only handle gusts up to 50 or 60 miles per hour and winds much worse than that were headed right toward them. Then Lennon, a UCHealth Physician Assistant (PA)<\/a> and University of Colorado School of Medicine<\/a> faculty member, and her crewmates flew back to Puerto Rico.<\/p>\n

On Puerto Rico, as winds gusted and rain from Maria began to pelt them, the team loaded dialysis patients on planes. The patients already had been evacuated from the Virgin Islands to Puerto Rico. But the power grid on Puerto Rico was fragile and now about 100 patients needed to be evacuated again, this time to Atlanta.<\/p>\n

Once their patients were safely on their way to the mainland, Lennon and her teammates raced back to their hotel to ride out Maria before they could get back to work helping people.<\/p>\n

\"Hurricane
Hurricane damage in Carolina, Puerto Rico. Photo courtesy of Erin Lennon.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

They had dubbed themselves \u201cTeam America.\u201d Technically, they were part of a U.S. Health and Human Services crew called DMAT Alaska 1, a Disaster Medical Assistance Team. One health worker was from Alaska, but there were others who had joined the team from California, Oregon, Colorado, Oklahoma and Alabama. Their mission was to provide medical help during one of the worst hurricane seasons in decades.<\/p>\n

Lennon originally expected to be gone two weeks. She first set out to Texas with a Colorado DMAT team to help after Hurricane Harvey blasted Houston. But as the storms kept coming, Lennon\u2019s service stretched to six weeks. She arrives back today to begin working once again in the surgery department at UCHealth\u2019s University of Colorado Hospital<\/a>.<\/p>\n

She returns home in awe of the humanity she witnessed.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople come and do the most amazing things. They really rise to the occasion. There\u2019s just a common human kindness,\u201d Lennon said. \u201cMy coworkers were awesome. I feel guilty for being home.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Maria began to come ashore in Puerto Rico, Lennon and her team counted their blessings that they were staying in a newer hotel, built to withstand ferocious winds.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was my first hurricane,\u201d Lennon said. \u201cIt was surreal outside. You could see all the damage that was happening.\u201d<\/p>\n

They watched roofs fly off buildings, including a section of their own hotel\u2019s roof. The wind stripped trees of their leaves and the flood waters rose. As the storm worsened, hotel workers moved the medical crew and other guests to the center hallway in case the windows shattered.<\/p>\n

Thankfully, the windows held as the storm pounded them for hours.<\/p>\n

\"Power
Power lines sagged after Hurricanes Irma and Maria hit St. Croix hard. Photo courtesy of Erin Lennon.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One of the team\u2019s first missions after the storm cleared was to rescue an older cancer patient who was stuck in a 10th<\/sup>-floor apartment next door. There was no power in the retired physician\u2019s building, so Lennon and other team members carried the man down all 10 floors by lifting him in his wheel chair. He then was able to seek refuge in a hospital nearby.<\/p>\n

Lennon then headed out to other hospitals in San Juan and nearby cities to see how they had fared. In a nearby city called Carolina, they found a hospital that had been functioning without any power after all its generators had been flooded. No power meant they had no use of equipment like ventilators, so for 13 hours, until the generators came back online, workers squeezed a tool that helped one of their patients take every single breath.<\/p>\n

In hospital after hospital, they found exhausted staff members coping with poor power supply.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnfortunately, that was the norm for the area. We were trying to get generators to them,\u201d Lennon said.<\/p>\n

One of her relief colleagues worked in a medical tent in 100-plus degrees caring for ICU patients.<\/p>\n

After several days in Puerto Rico, Lennon then traveled to St. Croix for 19 days. There, she found once green hillsides stripped of vegetation. Well-built structures had survived while a trailer park near the hospital was mostly destroyed.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt looked like a bomb had gone off,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Lennon slept her first two nights in St. Croix on a cot in the hospital, then was overjoyed when the crew was moved to a hotel with running water and air conditioning.<\/p>\n

On St. Croix, she helped evacuate more dialysis patients and handled an assortment of medical issues that arose.<\/p>\n

\"Erin
Erin Lennon, second from right, with other medical workers in St. Croix. Photo courtesy of Erin Lennon.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cI used to be a PA in the ER before moving to surgery. I really drew on my experience in both. I felt like all my work up until this point was preparing me for this,\u201d said Lennon, 39.<\/p>\n

She stitched up several patients who came in with lacerations and helped one man who had a partially lacerated Achilles tendon.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s something I would have had an orthopedic surgeon handle, but it had to be fixed right then and there, so I sutured it back together,\u201d Lennon said.<\/p>\n

The trauma of so much hardship also brought people to the clinic. One St. Croix native had recently lost her nephew, then learned her husband had terminal cancer. The storm nearly broke her. Her family brought her for help.<\/p>\n

Lennon spent a great deal of time listening to the woman\u2019s story and sharing methods for handling such overwhelming stress.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe had gone through so much. She touched my heart,\u201d Lennon said.<\/p>\n

Overall, she said she had excellent experiences.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe people were so wonderful. They cared about each other and cared about us,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Being home is bittersweet. Lennon knows she could have done more since the needs are so great in hurricane-affected areas. But, she\u2019s grateful that her leaders in the surgery department, Dr. Robert McIntyre<\/a> and Dr. Erik Peltz, made it possible for her to devote six weeks to hurricane relief work.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey said, \u2018We support you. This is in line with our mission and values. You\u2019re doing great work.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The best part of coming home has been seeing the friends and family she missed. Lennon has five nieces and nephews. She was gone so long that the youngest two had changed and grown in her absence. June is now four months old. And 10-month-old Sam learned to crawl while Lennon was gone.<\/p>\n

Since she subsisted for many weeks mostly eating military rations called MREs, Lennon was craving real food, especially Mexican fare. She\u2019s already gotten to have her first chile relleno.<\/p>\n

\"A
Finding the beauty after the hurricanes. A rainbow on St. Croix. Photo courtesy of Erin Lennon.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And she was thrilled to get back to her dog, Katrina, who is named after yet another hurricane. Lennon adopted Katrina on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. She\u2019s an 85-pound Malamute, who greeted Lennon by crawling into her lap and sitting on her. Katrina\u2019s message to Lennon was clear:<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re not going anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two deadly hurricanes already had hit and now a third was headed right toward the U.S. Virgin Islands, where\u00a0Erin Lennon and other medical relief workers had been trying to help the people of St. Thomas. Hurricane Irma had decimated the Caribbean islands. Now Maria was barreling toward them. The workers quickly took down the tent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2123,"featured_media":12522,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[235,1497],"class_list":["post-12515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-emergency-care","tag-uchealth-university-of-colorado-hospital"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAfter 3 hurricanes, medical relief worker returns home - UCHealth Today<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Workers took down the mobile field hospital. 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