Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Richard Pulga, 27, is in a hospital in Tacloban, but with not even antibiotics to treat him, doctors say his prognosis is grim.
TACLOBAN, the Philippines — Richard Pulga, a 27-year-old farmer with thick black hair and a gentle manner, has been lying on a hard steel bed in a dark hallway of the main hospital here since Saturday with a shattered lower right leg, abdominal pain and his right eye filling with blood.
One of the first victims of Typhoon Haiyan to be brought to the Eastern Visayas Regional Medical Center, Mr. Pulga was given just an intravenous drip — a bag of saline solution to prevent dehydration. No painkillers, no antibiotics, not even antiseptic to dress the purple, bulging wound on his calf.
He needs an X-ray to assess the damage to his leg. Miraculously, the hospital's X-ray machine made it intact through the typhoon and accompanying storm surge, which partly flooded the hospital's main floor.
But the hospital lacks even the electricity to turn the machine on to check if it works. The only source of power is a gasoline generator the size of a small clothes dryer, which powers the lights in the emergency room and a simple operating room.
Food is in short supply — Mr. Pulga receives just two small bowls of rice porridge a day. "The government should do more for me and fellow victims," he said. "It's not enough, we're almost starving here."
Almost everyone in Tacloban, a city of 220,000 that absorbed the heaviest blow from the typhoon, has lost family members; Jerry T. Yaokasin, the vice mayor, estimated that 90 percent of the city's employees were either killed or injured, or had a family member who was. Many, like Mr. Pulga, were hit by debris scattered by the typhoon, one of the most powerful ever recorded in the Pacific.
As he lay on the thin, striped cloth mat that was his only cushion against the bed, Mr. Pulga recounted his odyssey.
As the storm approached, Mr. Pulga sent his wife, 7-year-old son and 6-week-old daughter to stay with neighbors in a sturdier home, where they survived without serious injury — physically, at least. Traumatized and depressed, relatives say, his wife has not yet summoned the strength to visit him at the hospital.
Mr. Pulga stayed behind to guard their small, wood house. He tried to hide from the wind by hunching down behind the back of the house, only to find the wind and rain swirling in from every direction. A large coconut, accelerated to extraordinary speed by gusts that may have exceeded 200 miles per hour, rocketed through the dark and struck his leg, breaking it.
As he lay alone and injured, the wind tore the house into little pieces and flung them into the night. He was hit by a chunk of wood that bloodied his eye and cut the right side of his face. His 16-year-old nephew, at the home of one of Mr. Pulga's sisters, went outside to take a quick look at the storm and was struck by a piece of wood so heavy and sharp and moving so fast that it severed his leg, eventually killing him, Mr. Pulga said.
A neighbor brought Mr. Pulga first to a village clinic, where a wide, rectangular patch of gauze was firmly pressed to his leg wound with four long strips of white surgical tape. Then the neighbor brought him to the hospital here.
As they live roughly two miles from the ocean, they did not have to deal with the 13-foot storm surge that flattened large areas of Tacloban. One of Mr. Pulga's biggest worries is how to feed his family. The typhoon destroyed the vital rice crop, almost ready for harvest, on the meager two acres that he farms with his sisters and their families. The extended family is mostly women, and Mr. Pulga said that he needed to be healthy to do the heavy work of farming.
"I don't have any money, I've lost everything, even my house is gone," he said. "That's what is on my mind."
The storm also snapped off most of the coconut palms on his land that help provide sustenance. It will take a few years for them to start producing coconuts again, said Luminada Florendo, Mr. Pulga's aunt.
Coconuts, a source of food, fiber and charcoal, become a menace during powerful typhoons. The hospital bed parked in front of Mr. Pulga's in the hallway held a young man, Junlie Bueno, whose lower back had been broken by a wind-thrown coconut, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.
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