Joliet paramedic provided medical care in Malawi to victims of Cyclone Freddy

Branden Hoolehan, a paramedic with the Joliet Fire Department, lives to provide aid where need is the greatest.

Hoolehan, 32, is an Army veteran and served the Little Rock-Fox Fire Protection District in Plano before coming to the Joliet Fire Department in 2016.

But he’s also volunteered with organizations to deliver medical care in areas of crisis, most recently with Team Rubicon, where Hoolehan was part of a team that delivered medical care to people in Malawi, Africa, in the aftermath of Cyclone Freddy.

Kevin Hargis, captain at Station 7 of the Joliet Fire Department, said he’s worked with Hoolehan for the last six months and praised Hoolehan’s volunteer work and his work at the Joliet Fire Department.

“He’s doing this around the world on his days off, which is awesome. But that’s not the thing that impresses me,” Hargis said. “I hope that if something happens to me – or my family – that he is my paramedic. He is really very good, very smart and with lots of experience. … I would feel very reassured that he was my paramedic.”

A presence in time of emergencies

Zachary Brooks-Miller, senior director of the international program, said Team Rubicon is a veteran-lead humanitarian organization that responds to disasters around the world before, during and after disasters, and humanitarian crises.

“He’s doing this around the world on his days off, which is awesome. But that’s not the thing that impresses me. I hope that if something happens to me – or my family – that he is my paramedic. He is really very good, very smart and with lots of experience. … I would feel very reassured that he was my paramedic.”

—  Capt. Kevin Hargis, Joliet Fire Department

“We’d been keeping an eye on Cyclone Freddy for a while,” Brooks-Miller said. “It had formed off the coast of Australia in early February, traveled 5,000 miles along Madagascar and then worked its away to Malawi. The storm caused the most energetic storm on record for the most accumulated cyclone energy. So we were monitoring it, working with our partners on the ground, including WHO [World Health Organization].”

Brooks-Miller said Malawi’s minister of health, in coordination with the World Health Organization, put out a request for assistance from emergency medical teams.

So on March 26, Team Rubicon deployed 17 volunteers from its WHO-verified Emergency Medical Team (EMT) Type 1 Mobile and a four-person WASH team on March 31, according to the Team Rubicon website. A second EMT team was deployed on April 8.

WASH stands for water, sanitation and hygiene.

Hoolehan was part of the first EMT team, Brooks-Miller said. The first EMT members flew from their homes of record to Los Angeles, received briefing and picked up emergency medical kits, Brooks-Miller said. Hoolehan said his deployment ended April 15.

But he hopes to take part in more volunteer deployments.

“As many as I possibly can,” Hoolehan said. “I’ve always felt that if people can serve – and have the ability to serve others – they absolutely should. It’s one of the fundamental things about who I am. I don’t like the idea of seeing stuff in the world and not doing anything about that.”

Giving care, making hard decisions

Hoolehan said the EMT mobile teams went into remote areas of Malawi that were either not served or underserved. Their clinic was two pop-up tents, two folding tables and four bags of medical equipment the team brought with them.

The teams saw more than 3,000 patients and trained 2,000 people in WASH. Hoolehan said he did see “a good handful of wells,” which were certainly “better than digging a hole in the ground.”

“But they don’t have any way to test the well, to see if the wells are contaminated, if they need to treat the well,” Hoolehan said. “They just treat it as, ‘Yeah, it’s safe’ … and there were animals all over the place.”

He said that Malawi, a poor country in Africa, is a place where “splinters turn into necrotic wounds.”

“Without any kind of treatment, people die,” Hoolehan said.

Hoolehan said Malawi is “not exactly the most sanitary place in the world to get a wound clean” due to lack of education and resources. Hoolehan said he saw one necrotic wound that went clear to the patient’s bone.

“It was actually terrifying to see,” Hoolehan said.

Hoolehan said that incident “acutely describes” the people’s desperation. The EMT mobile team treats every single patient, so it focuses on the sickest, including those near death, and treat as many people as possible, he said.

That didn’t always include children who, by U.S. standards, definitely required medical care, Hoolehan said. Among those in line were people with sick children who, by U.S. standards, needed medical care and people near death, he said.

“It was a hard decision to make sometimes,” Hoolehan said, “especially in light of them having waited sometimes eight, nine, 10, 12 hours in the middle of the dirt, in 89-degree weather with 90% humidity. … We like to complain about our health care a lot. But nobody in the U.S. ever had to wait 12 hours in the middle of the dirt floor in order to see somebody. No one in the U.S. can say that.”

Malaria is a major health concern. Hoolehan said malaria comes in a simple form (“Take a pill and get over it,” Hoolehan said) and complex, which affects the nervous system and leads to organ failure.

“That requires advanced treatment, or you will die,” Hoolehan said. “We did see quite a few cases of advanced malaria, people walking with their small kids completely unconscious or having seizures. If it weren’t for us, they would have definitely died.”

Needs remain

Hoolehan said one of the biggest gifts people give to those in health care is “sharing their moments of vulnerability,” Hoolehan said.

“It’s hard to go to someone and say, ‘I have this problem. Please help me,’” Hoolehan said. “We might not be able to get to everybody, but we absolutely did as much as we could for as many people as we could.”

When their workday ended, volunteers either camped on-site or returned to a multi-building compound to re-stock supplies before departing for another remote area, Hoolehan said. Volunteers washed clothes by placing their garments in a dry bag with a couple of rocks and washing powder, and then rinsing the garments, hanging them and hoping they dry, he said.

The volunteers took showers using black 5-liter bags of water they hung from a tree, he said. They bought their food from local markets to support the economy, he said. Monkeys were a huge concern when camping in the open, he said.

“Monkeys are mean,” Hoolehan said. “Monkeys will come right up and steal your sandwich from you.”

Hoolehan said in a text message that seeing people’s happiness at receiving medical care is reward enough for him.

“Sometimes it’s just giving someone some Tylenol, sometimes it’s giving someone an inhaler and a McGuyvered inhaler spacer you made out of a plastic bottle, and sometimes it’s literally lifesaving intervention when the closest thing to healthcare is a day’s worth of walking away,” Hoolehan said in a text message. “But it’s always worth it, it’s always needed, and there’s always more that can or needs to be done so you keep going.”