There are a few miracles found in the misery left in the wake of the Haiti earthquake. A 43-year-old pregnant woman, trapped for nearly 70 hours, was pulled from the rubble of what was once a children’s hospital. The woman’s husband was in the same collapsed building, and he, too, survived.And hers isn’t the only miraculous story of survival in the disaster-ravaged nation – some of the most amazing accounts belong to the smallest victims.
An Australian television crew helped document, and dig, to rescue a 16-month-old girl named Winnie from a collapsed house nearly three days after the quake. She was brought to the open arms of her uncle, who had come to the house looking for his relatives believed to be trapped inside.
“My wife, she’s inside, she’s pregnant,” the uncle said.
Winnie’s rescuers gave all they had to get the little girl to safety.
“It was very emotional,” rescuer David Celestino said. “Honestly, I actually thought that it was my own baby that I was pulling out of there.”
Winnie escaped with just scratches, but she was one of the lucky ones. Many of the tiniest survivors have a long road ahead.
CBS News medical correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton treated a baby at a makeshift hospital.
“This is a six-month-old baby girl who sustained second- and third-degree burns to 40 percent of her body,” Dr. Ashton said. “If we were in a hospital, this baby would be probably sedated in an operating room.”
Dr. Ashton treated another rescued infant late Saturday evening. The two-month-old suffered skull fractures and broken ribs. She’ll be airlifted to Miami, but her prognosis is uncertain.
Doctors and medical professionals are in scarce supply in Haiti, and the bottleneck at the airport has caused significant delays in the arrival of medical supplies.
In many cases, makeshift hospitals have just a handful of professionals treating thousands of patients.
{WCBS-TV/Noam Amdurski-Matzav.com Newscenter}
