For two days, the Haitian woman refused to let Penn State doctors amputate her leg.
As the breadwinner for her family, she told them amputees in Haiti usually end up destitute in the streets. But eventually she agreed.
She was just one of the hundreds of earthquake victims that Penn State Hershey Medical Center doctors helped on their two-week trip to Haiti.
The ten medical professionals spent two weeks treating crush injuries and infections in 100-degree weather, said team member Matthew Budge, chief orthopedic surgery resident.
The destruction they saw was staggering. But despite the overwhelming devastation, the Haitians' gratitude kept the team's morale up.
"When you go to medical school, you expect to be helping people to make their lives significantly better, and that sometimes gets lost when you are treating American patients who are used to the high level of care," Budge said. "The people down there really appreciate what you are doing."
The team set up a field camp in a village about 45 minutes away from capital city of Port-au-Prince. The camp was the first of its kind in Haiti, medical center spokeswoman Megan Manlove said.
Seeing all the people trying to escape Haiti and cross into the Dominican Republic helped the team understand the magnitude of the situation, Budge said.
"When we first got to the camp, there were a hundred people there, and all of them had two-week old injuries," he said. "It was a really moving experience."
Because those with serious head and chest injuries died before medical care was available, the team mostly treated survivors with crush injuries and infections. If medical care hadn't provided, infections from the wounds would have claimed many more lives, Budge said.
Initially, the team worked out of a classroom, operating on picnic tables, but they soon moved to a more sanitary tent. Though the second operating room reached temperatures of up to 110 degrees, Budge said the team didn't mind.
They slept in tents, took bucket showers, and rationed their limited food supply carefully. But the patients the team treated were facing a much worse situation, said Budge, which helped the team stay focused and put the situation in perspective.
While the language barrier made getting patient's background stories difficult, Budge said they heard the same predicaments over and over again. In some cases, only one or two members of a family survived the earthquake, he said, adding that most patients no longer had homes to return to.
"There was a lot of mourning going on, a lot of singing at night," Budge said. "The story of everyone there was that they had lost multiple family members."
Young children either separated from their families or orphaned in the disaster made up a significant portion of the patients, Budge said.
"They were pretty resilient kids, but it was hard to walk into a camp of 8-year-old amputees who didn't have their parents with them," he said.
The team treated hundreds of patients throughout their stay, said Manlove, performing about 15 surgeries each day.
While Budge said the team was able to improve the lives of many, much aid is still needed.
"Even if we keep them alive, what are they going to have to go back to?" he said.
