Nasty!

I have taken care of a lot of gruesome wounds here in Haiti but the winner is a man from the Ravine who I've been treating for the past 2 weeks. He came to me with his middle finger swollen to the size of a sausage and an open wound on the lower part of his finger. I bandaged it for him and told him it was bad enough that he needed to go to a doctor. He did not go. A week later, I saw him again and the open wound had eaten all the way into his palm and across to the adjacent fingers. With advice from a US doctor, I put him on oral antibiotics and gave him daily shots of rocephin, but the infection just got worse. Yesterday, I told him that he had to go to the hospital and get surgery or else he would die from the infection. At this point, I'm guessing they will want to amputate at least the finger and perhaps several fingers and the upper part of the palm. Poor guy.