There is a great article in the Concord Monitor by Staff Reporter Ben Leubsdorf on Donna Lannan's visit to our hospital in Fond des Blancs.

"Donna Lannan had wanted to go abroad on a medical mission for years, but none of the places felt right until the ground began to shake in Haiti."

After the Jan. 12 earthquake that left more than 200,000 dead and once the survivors were pulled from the rubble and their wounds patched, Lannan, a physical therapist, knew she could help. There would be Haitians who suffered spinal injuries and would need months of therapy to return to their homes - if their homes hadn't been destroyed in the quake, which left an estimated 1 million homeless.

"They had such a huge number of rehab injuries. . . . That's a role that a PT could really step into and be needed," Lannan said yesterday, a week after returning to her home in Concord.

Lannan joined more than a dozen other medical professionals, most from the Boston area, on a weeklong trip to Haiti this month organized by Boston Healing Hands, a group that supports the work of Healing Hands for Haiti, which has operated medical programs in the nation since 1998.

Healing Hands for Haiti saw its Port-au-Prince clinic destroyed in the earthquake, but it's still providing assistance, including to the two hospitals where patients with spinal-cord injuries are being treated, according to Gail Buck, who coordinates volunteer teams for the group.

Lannan worked with about 20 patients, ranging in age from a 12-year-old boy to a woman in her 50s, at St. Boniface Hospital in Fond des Blancs, southwest of Port-au-Prince. Lannan and her colleagues worked with patients and helped teach their families and hospital staff how to assist them with everyday tasks, as well as build skills to eventually "optimize function."

"These catastrophic injuries result in chronic conditions that these people will never fully recover from," said Lannan, 53. "These really are pretty big, life-changing events. It's not like they can get better and go back to what they did before."

Hoosier to Haiti

Lannan, a native of Indianapolis, taught biology in Indiana and Massachusetts and ran fitness programs at the YMCA in Manchester and Concord before deciding to train as a physical therapist. She graduated from the University of Massachusetts-Lowell at the age of 40.

"I wanted to do physical therapy when I was in an undergraduate program, and I was steered away from it by a guidance counselor," Lannan said. "And 18 years later, I said, 'No, I think this is what I really want to do.' "

Now working at Catholic Medical Center in Manchester, Lannan said she had been looking for a couple of years to go overseas as well. Once the earthquake struck and the need for physical therapy was evident, Lannan sprung into action. She did research on Healing Hands for Haiti, a Salt Lake City-based organization that works in Haiti. In February, she e-mailed her resume to Janet Larkin, a nurse at Quincy Medical Center in Quincy, Mass., who was organizing a trip to Haiti.

"And then I just started getting all these e-mails," Lannan said.

Her 11-year-old daughter helped put her over the edge, Lannan said. "Oh Mommy, you need to go. Those people in Haiti need help," Lannan recalled her saying.

So Lannan got her shots, put in for vacation and began raising money from friends and family to help cover the roughly $1,200 cost of airfare, travel insurance, housing and other expenses. She said she ended up paying about half out of pocket.

On April 3, she flew from Boston's Logan International Airport to Port-au-Prince via Miami, joined by the therapists, nurses, specialists and others making up the Boston Healing Hands volunteer team."

Read the full article here.

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