Woman, 84, rescued from Haiti rubble

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11:42 AEST Sat Jan 23 2010


Friends and family dug 84-year-old Marie Carida Roman from the ruins of her Port-au-Prince home with their bare hands on Friday, 10 days after she was buried by Haiti's killer earthquake.

Standing by her bedside in the city's General Hospital, her son and doctors spoke with astonishment at how the frail, elderly woman had managed to cling to life long enough to become Haiti's latest miracle rescue.

"I'm trying to find out how I can help her survive. She has a crushed chest and had lots of maggots" all over her body, said Ernest Benjamin, an emergency volunteer from Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York city.

"It's worth everything to try to save her," Benjamin added.

Nearby, Carida Roman lay hooked up to a drip and oxygen. Her eyes fluttered as they struggled to open.

"She is 84. She's been fighting for 10 days, and now I have to give her 24 hours to say what chance she has," said Vladimir Laroche, a doctor from Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital, also in New York.

"When she was brought in here, there was no movement. Now her jaw moves. She was completely dehydrated," Laroche said.

The exact extent of her injuries is unclear, but her legs are covered in lacerations and bruises, some from the maggots, which have now been removed.

The doctors' priority is to ensure her organs can function properly, without giving her too much nourishment that could overload her shattered body.

Carida Roman's son, a 58-year-old telephone technician who refused to give his name, said: "I heard her calling yesterday at around 9.00 or 10.00 in the morning. Friends in the neighbourhood helped dig her out with our bare hands.

"We pulled her out at around 7.00 this morning," her shell-shocked son said.

When the 7.0-magnitude quake struck on January 12, Carida Roman's son was at a government office dealing with paperwork.

He returned to the single room his family calls home to find that his wife had managed to run outside with their seven-year-old son, surviving unscathed.

But his mother was trapped under several floors of rubble, and he had given up hope of finding her alive until he heard her weak cries coming from the wreckage of their home on Thursday.

"It's a miracle," he said.

After initial treatment at the hospital, where many injured lie in the courtyard because of threat of aftershocks, Carida Roman was taken by helicopter to a US military hospital ship anchored off the Haitian capital.

Laroche, part of a group of Haitian-American doctors flown out in the quake's aftermath to provide emergency assistance, continues his grim task, refusing to be congratulated on his life-saving work.

"Every time there's an aftershock, we have to take everyone outside," he said, standing in a hospital ward surrounded by plaster debris that has fallen from the walls because of the ongoing tremors.

Meanwhile, an Israeli search team has pulled a 22-year-man from the rubble.

Video of the rescue obtained by The Associated Press shows rescue workers pulling the man from a crevasse in the wreckage of what had been a three-story home.

A statement from the Israeli Defence Force says local residents led the team to the site on Friday, adding that the man was in stable condition at an Israeli field hospital in Port-au-Prince.

Shirtless, the man appears either unconscious or barely conscious and covered in dust as he is hoisted onto a stretcher.

The rescues bring to at least 123 the number of survivors pulled from the wreckage of the catastrophic earthquake, which has left at least 75,000 people dead and half a million homeless.


http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=1003176

oh wow what a miracle and and gross and it sounds those maggots probably did a good job cleaning up the dead tissue