'We Urgently Need Help'

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AFP

Hospitals in the areas of Japan most devastated by last week's earthquake and tsunami are treating a steady stream of injured victims. But, faced with increasing shortages of manpower, food and supplies -- and a tense situation in nearby Fukushima -- they must also battle their own nerves.

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Iwaki Kyoritsu Hospital is only 45 kilometers (28 miles) from the Fukushima nuclear power plant. It's the largest hospital in the region, and it specializes in caring for premature babies. It's also one of the few hospitals in the disaster area to escape the earthquake and tsunami relatively unscathed.

 

When the earthquake struck last Friday morning, the hospital had 650 patients. Since then, a little more half have been released or transferred to other hospitals. But the hospital still has more than 300 sick patients, and the situation there is growing increasingly precarious.

"We are running out of medicine, and we urgently need help," Nobuo Hiwatashi, the hospital's 62-year-old director, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. He said the situation had been especially difficult during the first days after the earthquake because the power had been cut off. The hospital was also short on food and other supplies, and Hiwatashi feared that his staff wouldn't be able to take care of its patients. However, since then, they've been able to provide packaged soups and rice balls.

Hiwatashi adds that the number of people injured in the area is relatively modest because the tsunami apparently killed far more people than it injured. Still, though the hospital now has far fewer patients, it is still seeing 30 new admissions of injured people each day. "We provide ambulatory care to most and then send them back home," he says. "Most of the people who come to us are elderly. They are brought to us from emergency shelters." He said they often arrive frail, weak or chronically ill.

Making Do

There is a wide age span among the hospital's patients. Elderly patients are kept on one side of the hospital, and newborns on the other. Most of the babies were quickly flown to Tokyo to guarantee their safety. But four newborns weighing less than a kilogram (2.2 pounds) each are currently fighting for their lives there because they're still too weak to be transported.

For now, the babies' lives are in the hands of Yoshinobu Honda. Since the earthquake struck, the 49-year-old neonatologist hasn't driven home once and has been spending his nights at the hospital. For the hospital's employees, the most pressing concerns are developments at the nuclear power plant and how high radiation levels will rise. "We don't want to risk the lives of our patients," Hiwatashi says, "but we are also located near Fukushima. We're doing the best we can for everyone still here."

Hiwatashi says the hospital is at least lucky to have access to drinking water again. "In the first days after the quake, we were running low on water in addition to not having power," he says. "The situation was devastating, and we were desperate. We didn't know what would happen next."

Staff shortfalls are making matters worse. "Either the employees can't show up at work because they don't have any gas to drive here," Hiwatashi says, "or they don't come because they're worried about the possibility of radiation exposure."

Of the 108 doctors on staff, only 60 of them are still working. Hiwatashi has sent out the eight youngest doctors to work in first-aid centers. The rest have been driven away by fear of a nuclear catastrophe. Of a total of 730 nurses, only about 500 are still working their shifts. Many of them spend the night at the hospital to save time and fuel.

Scavenging for Food

Since the earthquake destroyed many of the area's hospitals, patients are now being housed in homes that escaped complete destruction. At the Senen General Hospital in Takajo, near the Miyagi prefecture's capital of Sendai, part of the ceiling collapsed. Equipment was damaged, and the tsunami washed away all the food and medicine on the ground floor.

Ryoichi Hashiguchi, the hospital's administrator, told the Associated Press that he had 80 patients transferred to a nearby shelter. Four other patients, all of whom were over 90 and in very poor shape already, died before they could be transferred.

In the days right after the disaster, patients and staff members shared frozen noodles that the nurses were able to salvage out of the water. They had to turn away people looking for help and refer them to other places.

Keeping Calm