Next came a 7-year-old and his father, who had accidentally driven a pickax into his son’s head while breaking up the rubble of his home. The ax had punctured the boy’s brain.
The team had little resources to help the boy, Wong said, so she made a call and discovered that the humanitarian organization Samaritan’s Purse began air evacuations that day and could take him by helicopter to a medical facility if they could get him to a soccer field. The problem was, they didn’t have a car.
Soon after, Wong said a white Jeep Cherokee came down that same driveway, full of nurses asking if they could help. The car took the boy to the helicopter, and soon after he received medical treatment at the University of Miami in Port-au-Prince, Wong said.
“The miracles just kept happening, one after another,” she said.
From Jan. 24 to 31, Wong and her team saw hundreds of patients and handled several emergency situations. She said the team delivered four babies — one by an emergency caesarean section administered in the dark with the aid of flashlights.
Wong said that “the favor of God was apparent” in all of the aid she and her team received to make the trip.
On Jan. 20, she received a call from the Texas-based nonprofit organization Acts of Mercy. Officials asked her if she could lead the medical team in Haiti. Having led a team in Sri Lanka through the same organization in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Wong agreed.
The team was set to leave Jan. 24, so Wong had four days to assemble her team members and supplies.
However, due to her work schedule, she said she had one day to make all the calls to organize efforts and collect necessary provisions.
Asking her fellow Glendale Adventist emergency medicine doctor Cheryl Lee to come along, Wong assembled a team of eight more doctors and nurses from Los Angeles and Texas.
