Retired nurse returns from Haiti

COEUR d'ALENE - Deanna King is home, safe and exhausted.

The retired nurse who was jolted back into the medical field following the 7.0-magnitude earthquake in Haiti returned Wednesday night from her month-long mission of providing aid to the disaster victims.

It was an intense, at times overwhelming, experience, she said, but one where she was glad to offer help.

"It's definitely the worst one I've seen," she said Thursday. "It's certainly a pleasure to be back home and see my family and get life back to normal."

King, a nurse since 1985 who has gone on nearly 20 overseas medical mission trips including offering aid following the tsunami in Indonesia, arrived in Haiti days after the earthquake.

"We went directly to work," she said. "People were coming for help as soon as they saw we were there."

King and fellow nurses set up a clinic outside King's Hospital, on Martin Luther King Road in the capital, Port-au-Prince.

The injured were terrified to enter any buildings, so "we just started treating people right there."

"There were so many fractures and terrible wounds," she said.

The teams worked 12 to 13 hours a day, seven days a week, while a group of American surgeons performed non-stop operations, she said.

The death toll of the quake has reached more than 200,000. The devastation from the quake surpassed that of the tsunami in her view.

"There were more critically injured people there," she said. "It was much, much worse in terms of how catastrophic it was."

But the continuing work didn't give the medical teams time to dwell on the chaos.

"You're so busy, you just don't have time to think about it much," she said. "The need is so vast, you don't even think about it, you just do your job."

"I usually didn't know what day it was," she said.

Around a week after the initial quake, an aftershock hit, and amplified the locals' fear of entering buildings, but a large group of locals lined up and touched King's Hospital and prayed for its safety, after which they gained confidence to enter for treatment.

She said seeing firsthand "the victories" from the successful surgeries and treatments - especially on all the children - made the trip rewarding.

The locals, she said, refer to the quake now as "The Event," and use it as a marking date on the calendar to tell time.

When asked when something happened, locals are likely to respond, "Three days after The Event," for example, she said.

She said she was amazed at how many children had both parents killed, and how quietly they would relay that information to medical teams.

"These little children, they were kind of stoic about it all," she said. "I think they're still in shock."

Safely home, King said she hasn't had too many respiratory problems from breathing the dust from the ruins since, but is a little tired from the ordeal and happy to be back.

"Oh boy," she said. "There's no place like the good ol' U.S.A., and no place like North Idaho."