Jetrader - September/October 2010 - 37

Ralph was discharged from the hospital 27 June 2010, after four months of care and nine surgeries. He is shown here leaving the hospital with Ayal Lindeman.

Ralph Gedeon is evactuated from Port au Prince to Hospital of Saint Raphael in New Haven, Connecticut.

After nine surgeries and countless hours of hospital treatment, Ralph was ﬁt with a prosthetic leg and is now able to walk once again.

University of Miami. By chance, he dialed Roland’s number while Roland happened to be at the hospital about 15 feet away from Ayal! Ayal begged Roland to ﬁnd a way to get Ralph and several other patients to the United States for the medical treatment necessary to save their lives. One phone call to ISTAT member Nick Popovich, and ISTAT arranged to subsidize a ﬂight of Nick’s private plane to Haiti to pick up these patients and bring them to the United States. Although the logistics were complicated enough to be the source of an entire article themselves, with the perseverance of Nick’s staff, the mission succeeded and Ralph was brought to the Hospital of Saint Raphael in New Haven, Connecticut. The hospital and Dr. David Gibson, an orthopedic surgeon who teaches at Yale School of Medicine and who is a long-time friend of Ayal Lindeman, agreed to provide Ralph’s medical care for free. Ralph endured nine surgeries and heavy, nonstop intravenous antibiotics

over a four-month period before he was healthy enough to be ﬁt with a prosthetic leg. Upon his release from the hospital, Dr. Gibson said, “Ralph is an absolute miracle. Getting him to where he is today is truly something that has changed my life.” I have had the pleasure of visiting with Ralph many times during the last ﬁve months. I saw him when he ﬁrst arrived in Connecticut, and he shook with pain as the medication couldn’t keep up with his agony. In May, I was thrilled to take him out of the hospital for lunch one day and accompany him on his ﬁrst steps (albeit with one leg) on U.S. soil. In July I visited Ralph and his father in his new apartment in Spring Valley, New York, where he will be completing his out-patient rehabilitation and is enrolled in English classes. I brought Ralph a soccer ball, and I fully expect to see him playing soccer soon! What is next for Ralph? With the help of ISTAT volunteers and contributors, Ralph will enroll in community college in

September to complete the requirements necessary to get into engineering school in January 2011 and complete his engineering degree. He wants to switch from electrical engineering, which he studied in Haiti, to mechanical engineering, so he can go back to Haiti and help design prosthetic limbs for the thousands of Haitians who need them. Ayal Lindeman, who continues to assist Ralph and his family, wanted to thank ISTAT and again express his gratitude: “If only your members could have seen the faces of the medical volunteers that day in Haiti when the ambulance pulled out for the runway with the three patients aboard. If they could see the faces of the other nurses or see the e-mail trafﬁc from medical volunteers across the globe when they hear the news about Ralph, their lives would have been as touched as mine was.” Last week Ralph walked three quarters of a mile to his English class without a cane!

“Ralph is an absolute miracle. Getting him to where he is today is truly something that has changed my life.”
- Dr. David Gibson, orthopedic surgeon

Jetrader 37

Jetrader - September/October 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Jetrader - September/October 2010