For 17 years I was a medical writer for two major American newspapers; first The Washington Post, and then Newsday. And in all that time, with the thousands of hours I spent in laboratories, clinics, and hospitals, I was never on hand in the Emergency Room during a Code, the all out struggle to bring a patient back from the brink of death, often successfully, and some times not. But in the late summer of 2014, when I was in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, photographing for a Miami based NGO called Project Medishare, I was in the right place at the right time.

One morning while I was drinking coffee in the breakroom of Bernard Mevs Hospital, in Port-au-Prince, a Project Medishare volunteer from Minnesota came running from the ER to get me. "Grab your cameras and come on if you want to see a Code underway," he said. Needless to say I gathered up my gear and ran for the always busy, grossly overcrowded Emergency Room at one of Haiti's precious few trauma centers.

I arrived in the ER with the Code already underway. The patient a Haitian woman who had collapsed suddenly at home, was brought to the hospital by an ambulance that took way too long for her good to ever so slowly make its way through the nearly impenetrable traffic jam that is traffic in Port-au-Prince. By the time the woman was brought into the hospital she had already stopped breathing and was in cardiac arrest. But the Emergency staff wasn’t prepared to write her off, and jumped into a 25 minute medical battle with death, with Medishare volunteers and hospital staff struggling to get the woman breathing and restore a cardiac rhythm. The images you see here document that struggle, and I hope they do so in a way that was respectful to the patient. And while these primal battles usually have happy endings in TV medical dramas, in real life they often do not.

You can read another article by B.D. Colen on Haiti here:

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