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Annie Lewis-O'Connor, with sons Liam, left, and Daniel, prepares for her deployment to Haiti.
Liam O’Connor is proud that his mom, a member of the CWN Nursing team and a nurse practitioner at BWH, is heading to Haiti this week with a BWH team to care for earthquake victims.
“I think it’s wonderful that she’s helping a lot of people,” said the 10-year-old, who, along with his twin brother Daniel, is helping his mother, Annie Lewis-O’Connor, NP, MPH, PhD, get ready. “I think she has the strength to do all this stuff.”
At the O’Connors’ home in Westwood on Monday, preparations for her two-week deployment to Haiti were in full swing. Lewis-O’Connor carefully laid out her supplies on the dining room table, and in the kitchen, one of her sons marked “Haiti” on the family white board for activities. For Lewis-O’Connor, efforts to prepare herself and her fourth-grade sons are intertwined.
“I want to involve my kids as much as possible,” said Lewis-O’Connor, program manager of Nursing Practice for the Connors Center for Women and Newborns. “I’m trying to reinforce to my family that what they see on TV is not necessarily where I am going to be, that I will be in a medical setting, and that I will be safe. They also get to witness humanitarian efforts and how the health care community can contribute—Haiti so desperately needs our help.”
Feeling compelled to get involved in relief efforts, she last week wrote to BWH’s haitiresponse@partners.org e-mail address to volunteer her skills and training as a nurse practitioner.
“I was very drawn to the situation, and I just felt that I had some skills that could help,” said Lewis-O’Connor, who has never participated in a mission like this, but said that, by nature of their training, nurses bring compassion and caring to such situations. “In Haiti, these are families, just like we are, who are looking for their loved ones.”
The logistics of the trip—when she will leave and where she will be stationed—were not firm on Monday, but she knows she will be deploying either directly to Haiti or the Dominican Republic by mid-week. On Sunday, she received a call that she had been selected to volunteer and was at BWH for immunizations within three hours.
“Liam came with me, and he was a scribe in the car, writing down all the things I said I might need to bring,” said Lewis-O’Connor.
On Monday, her son Daniel, who says he will miss his mother very much, got out his laptop to look up a backpack with solar panels for charging phones and cameras that could help her. Then they looked over her supplies, which included scrubs, cargo pants, a sleeping bag, flashlight with extra batteries, a journal and Liam’s digital camera—a Christmas gift he is loaning to his mom to document her time in Haiti.
She hopes to send them a picture of where she is stationed so they don’t worry, and she will call or e-mail them if she can.
PIH has many centers in Haiti, some of which are marked on this map in black.
At the same time as she prepares herself and her sons for her deployment, she also is busy making arrangements so that the twins, who will stay with their father, don’t miss baseball registrations, birthday parties and hockey practice. They even planned to squeeze in a movie together on Monday night; the boys wanted to see “The Blind Side” at the nearby Legacy Place movie theater.
She is glad for the support of her family as well as the BWH community. “I think the Brigham has done a phenomenal job coordinating this response,” she said. “I felt so impressed by the reaction of everyone as this unfolded. It makes you feel proud to be part of the Brigham community.”
She added that the recovery efforts in Haiti are going to be a long journey. “I know the Brigham will stay involved,” she said. “Anyone who has the opportunity to contribute in any way should. This is a situation where the pieces really make the whole. It is everyone’s unique contributions—nurses, doctors, military and other professionals—that will provide the best opportunity for assisting in Haiti.”
While she is uncertain about what exactly to expect in Haiti, Lewis-O’Connor is excited to help in any way she can. “This experience is going to be grounding and humbling,” she said.
See photos online here.