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Deb Bohan, center, a physician assistant from Jenkins Township, examines a 14-year-old Haitian girl named Angelique who was suffering from complications of diabetes.

A mentally challenged Haitian boy named Luke was agitated as he came out of a seizure. Phyisican assistant Deb Bohan held and comforted him until he settled down.

Physician assistant Deb Bohan of Jenkins Township looks forward to returning to Haiti, where the people have touched her heart.

On her first trip to Haiti, shortly after the devastating earthquake of January 2010, Deb Bohan thought she’d help a colleague deliver medical supplies and immediately escort orphans back to the United States for adoption.

Expecting a short visit, she traveled with only “the clothes I had on and my camera.”

But the physician assistant, who lives in Jenkins Township, found her skills were so needed, she ended up staying two and a half weeks and then returning six more times.

“I feel a connection,” she said. “I feel like I’m making a difference.”

Working with a group from Illinois on her first mission — after spending the first night sleeping on the tarmac at Toussaint Louvertoure International Airport and hitching a ride on a dump truck about 14 miles from Port au Prince to the town of Leogane— Bohan devoted much of the first week to sedating people whose injuries required amputations.

“We had no oxygen, no heart monitors, nothing like what we’d have in the States,” she said.

A child needed to have a finger amputated; an older adult lost an arm. A steady stream of patients needed treatment, and Bohan said she’ll remember some of them forever.

“There was a 14-year-old girl, Angelique. I will never forget this girl to the day I die,” Bohan said. “The initial assessment was an abdominal injury. Her mom kept pointing to her belly. But she was a new-onset diabetic. It had never been diagnosed. There was a high glucose level in the blood and an altered level of consciousness.”

“I could smell her breath,” Bohan said, indicating a certain fruity odor is a symptom of a chemical imbalance called diabetic ketoacidosis.

Bohan remembers thinking to herself: “This is something I deal with at home on a regular basis. We can fix this. She’ll be OK. We can give her some fluids and insulin.”

The father left to tend to the other children while the mother stayed with Angelique.

“I was so sure of myself,” Bohan said. “I knew we could fix this in the States. We do it all the time.”

But the makeshift medical facility in Haiti didn’t have insulin.

“The resources weren’t available,” Bohan said. “She ended up dying that night at 9 o’clock.”

“I sat there with that mom while she cried,” Bohan said. “I cried. I asked the translator to tell the mom ‘I’m so sorry.’ This mother actually reached over to me and hugged me and comforted me. The translator said, ‘She knows you did everything you can and she thanks you for caring for her daughter and trying to save her.’

“That one episode, along with everything else that happened, changed me as a person and me as a provider,” Bohan said. “I learned not to take anything for granted.”

Hospital Bernard Mevs, the trauma and critical care hospital where Bohan has felt “privileged to volunteer” once or twice each year since that first trip, is better equipped with medications, but has fewer resources than hospitals in the United States.

“It seems we are always running out of something and have to use an alternative,” Bohan said. “I learned you can practice medicine without fancy bells and whistles. You can diagnose and treat and manage with very little.”

She added that in Haiti, “I feel like I’m practicing medicine the way it should be practiced, not worrying about doing this or that so I don’t get sued, ordering tests because that’s what everybody expects you to do. You just worry about doing what is necessary and right for the patient.”

Back in the United States, Bohan feels as if she lives in a different world. She divides her time between Jenkins Township — where she decided to live in order to be close to her parents — and Baltimore, where she works for the Bon Secours Baltimore Health System on a week-on/week-off basis.

She also recently earned a specialty credential called a Certificate of Added Qualifications (CAQ) from the National Commission on Certification of Physician Assistants.

According to a press release from the NCCPA, Bohan is one of 33 certified physician assistants in Pennsylvania and about 800 nationally who earned a CAQ since the program’s inception in 2011. She earned her CAQ in emergency medicine by meeting continuing-education and experience requirements and passing an exam in the specialty. In August, she plans to take a test for an additional CAQ in hospital medicine.

But even as she works to advance her career in the United States, Bohan is determined to return to Haiti — where the people have touched her heart.

“I’m working on saving up some money,” she said.