Conventional wisdom has it that past 72 hours after a devastating incident like last Tuesday’s earthquake, rescuers digging through rubble are looking for bodies, not survivors. But a full ten days after the devastating incident, reports out of Port-au-Prince say that a woman was rescued from underneath the ruins of her collapsed house by her family and neighbors. Eighty-four-year-old Marie Carida Romain was freed after twenty hours of digging, and is in hospital care now. “She is very thin. She is in a state of shock and severely dehydrated,” Dr. Louis Auguste, who works at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New York, told the Associated Press. Given her condition, age, and the length of time she was trapped apparently without food or water, her chances of survival are not great. But, Dr. Auguste pointed out, “There were always people who defy the norm.”
