OSF Plays Dirty–2002--December 2019

 

EB 1588--OSF Plays Dirty–2002--Dec 2019

Peoria Riverfront–(Photo by John Carroll)

In January 2002, I left for Haiti again with a small group of people from Peoria. We worked in a hospital in the mountains of southern Haiti where I had been working for many years. We were in Haiti for about a month and when we returned to Peoria, we brought back a group of Haitian kids for heart surgery at OSF. 

I was sad about being fired from OSF in December 2001 and I missed seeing patients in the ER and being with the resident and attending physicians. However, Haiti was sustaining me and has sustained me during the last 18 years by allowing me to treat patients and be a doctor which is what I love doing. It has been an amazing experience to have saved Haitian lives as they have saved mine.  

Back in Peoria, I arranged for surgeries to be done on the new Haitian patients and continued to raise funds for Children’s Hospital of Illinois. 

While I was doing this in the Spring of 2002,  OSF was trying to stop me from being in the pre-op area with the Haitian child and their host family on the morning of surgery.  Over the previous six years, I not only had been with the host parents and Haitian children preoperatively, but I went back to the operating room with the children, held them while they were being put to sleep by the anesthesiologist, and then I frequently was allowed to “scrub in” with the heart surgeons to assist (in a minor way) with heart surgery.  This incredible experience gave me a birdseye view of the actual cardiac pathology involved and allowed me to correlate the physical findings on my exam and the preop echocardiogram. And after surgery was complete, I went to the Pediatric Cardiovascular ICU and gave the host family a summary of how surgery went.  

After surgery I followed the child with the surgeons, cardiologists, and intensive care physicians, and any other consultants on the case. Even though I am not a pediatrician, I played an important role as the primary care physician (there was no pediatrician involved), cohesively linking the child’s medical care with the numerous specialized physicians caring for the child. With this role, I was able to explain complex medical details involving the child’s case to the host family. This was in the days before the smartphone and social apps, but I tried to keep the child’s biologic family in Haiti up to date with their child’s heart surgery recovery.  They had put their child’s life in my hands, and it was so important to keep them informed as much as possible. 

OSF Administration’s attempts to keep me out of the preop area and operating rooms did not get enough political traction and so they were unable to completely stop me. OSF must have figured they had hurt me enough at that point, and they would look even worse if the press found out that they were trying to isolate me even further. Thus, I continued caring for Haitian patients pre-op and taking them back to the operating room.  

On July 12, 2002, Keith Steffen withdrew all OSF financial support for Haitian kids’ heart surgeries. It amounted to the loss of approximately $260,000 per year dedicated to Haitian kids’ heart surgeries at OSF. 

In 2002, in spite of all of this, Haitian Hearts had a great year raising money for OSF-Children’s Hospital of Illinois (CHOI). By the end of the year, we had contributed $445,000 to CHOI. And this is just the donations…. that I knew about. 

Caterpillar Inc. headquarters was in Peoria during those years and Caterpillar Inc. was donating $10,000 each year to Children’s Hospital of Illinois for my Haitian kids’ surgeries. However, in 2002, I noticed on the computer that we did not get credit from the Children’s Hospital Foundation for the $10,000 from Caterpillar Inc. As a child, I had been friends with Henry Holling who was Manager of Caterpillar Foundation/Social Responsibility Department.  It was Mr. Hollings’s job to decide who Caterpillar Inc. financially helped. I was thrilled when he chose to help Haitian kids at Children’s Hospital but not so thrilled when I figured out that Children’s was not using Caterpillar’s gift specifically for Haitian childrens’ heart surgeries.  In other words, the money that Caterpillar Inc. had donated and earmarked for my Haitian kids’ surgeries was not being earmarked that way at Children’s and Haitian Hearts was not getting the credit for this donation to Children’s Hospital. (We were never able to recover this money.)

As rough as this sounds in early 2002, it was going to get worse, much worse, before the year was over.

(To be continued….)

 

John A. Carroll, MD

www.haitianhearts.org