PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 22, (AFP) Friends and family rescued 84-year-old Marie Carida Roman alive from the rubble of her Port-au-Prince home Friday, 10 days after she was buried by Haiti's killer earthquake, her son and doctors told AFP at her hospital bedside.
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| Some of the 33 orphans from the Lycee Francais in Port-au-Prince sit in a bus on their way to the airport to be flown to France for adoption on January 21. AFP |
“I'm trying to find out how I can help her survive. She has a crushed chest and 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, the frail woman lay on her bed at Port-au-Prince's crowded General Hospital, hooked up to a drip and her face covered with an oxygen mask. “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 doctor Vladimir Laroche of 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, adding that the woman had “multiple wounds on her leg and lots of other injuries.”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 neighborhood helped dig her out with their bare hands.” |
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