By Eleanor Miller

Eleanor Miller was at home in New York when a friend's Facebook post alerted her to an aid trip leaving to help Haitian earthquake victims. Less than 48 hours later, she was on a plane to the Dominican Republic, and from there flew to Port-au-Prince to volunteer.

After navigating an extremely difficult logistical situation, a group of us ended up at CDTI, a hospital normally open only to private patients. After the earthquake, its doors were thrown open to anyone who queued outside its gates, and its gleaming rooms were converted into makeshift operating rooms and triage units.

We spent just under two days at the hospital. My friend Aash and I, neither of us medical professionals, learned to dress wounds and assist surgeons. We spoke to survivors haunted by pain both physical and emotional. Amputations and fasciotomies were the most common procedures because so many people had been wounded by falling debris. Doctors told us that amputees are now likely to be a significant portion of the population because infection is such a common problem and regular follow-up care so desperately needed (and unlikely to occur).

The first day we spent at the hospital was the most chaotic. Makeshift tents had been set up outside the hospital entrance, and nurses were scrambling to find supplies among the limited pile of materials that had been delivered. There were many types of medical professionals working alongside each other, generally more doctors than nurses: All the doctors said they needed more nurses. Certain specialities were also in high demand – orthopedists, plastic surgeons, general surgeons – and there weren't enough of these, either. At CDTI, I saw ER doctors, anesthesiologists, orthopedists, surgeons, general practitioners, paramedics, an army medic, and several types of nurses. There were around 30 people working at the hospital at any given time. The first day, most were American. None were Haitian, except for one medical student who normally worked at a different hospital. By the next day, the eighth day since the earthquake, a French team had moved in and taken over much of the running of the hospital, though the doctors operating were mostly American ... and there still weren't enough nurses. Volunteers like me and Aash, from any country, were not typical.

I translated French as best I could for some of the doctors, but found myself at a loss more than once – not simply because I didn't know all the medical vocabulary in French but because telling people about their injuries and watching their reactions was so difficult. I tried to comfort the father of one little girl who was going through debridement (removing infected tissue) on a deep head laceration. The girl screamed so loudly and heart-wrenchingly that even her father, a stoic man, couldn't keep his tears back.

The hardest part of my experience at the hospital was when medics examined a woman's severely infected foot and decided it couldn't be saved. I was asked to tell her that they needed to amputate. The infection would slowly creep up her leg if she didn't get her foot removed, and she would eventually die from poisoned blood. I translated to the patient. At first she and her husband just stared at me and I wondered desperately if my grammar was so bad that they hadn't understood. But they had. No amount of cajoling by me, nurses or doctors could convince the woman and her husband to have the amputation. I wondered if she might have been more easily convinced had she been surrounded by fewer foreigners and less chaos.

In a country already so poor, the chances of her getting a prosthesis or consistent follow-up care from foreign doctors passing in and out of the country every day were slim, and she knew that. She also knew that being crippled for the rest of her life would severely limit her ability to care for her family in an environment like Haiti. The woman and her husband left. The next morning, a team of 12 from the U.S. had to fly out, leaving the hospital short-staffed. It remained to be seen if any of them – patients or doctors – would return.