Dr. Dick Furman, co-founder of World Medical Mission, was part of a Samaritan's Purse team that arrived in Haiti less than a week after the earthquake to help provide emergency medical treatment. He reflected on his experiences on his flight out a week later.

I don’t know how their memories will affect me as time goes on. But now it is difficult not to compare their suffering with life as we know it. They will not sleep in their homes because of the aftershocks. At night they still cry out and moan and wail. The stench remains in the air as you drive by buildings that have collapsed.

And then there are the patients that we operated on. So many of them were in despair with nowhere to go and loved ones dead. When I made my last walk through the hospital, I left behind patients I will remember for the rest of my life.

Flying home on the plane, I think back over what was the most horrific time I have ever experienced in my life. I have never seen such suffering. I have never seen so many people go through so much sorrow.

It surely looked different on TV. Watching it, you could get a feeling of what the earthquake was like. You could get a feeling of the destruction of buildings, houses, and stores. You could even get some insight into the terrible devastating emotions of the survivors.

But I couldn’t really understand what it was all about until I met one particular patient. She had been in the kitchen, with her husband and four children in the next room, when their third floor apartment begin to shake and sway—and less than 60 seconds later her family was dead, and she had a slab of concrete roof lying on her legs and pelvis.

We operated on her, and for the next week, every time I examined her at her bedside, she would begin shaking her head and weeping. Last night, my final night in Haiti, I left our quarters and slipped down to the hospital and prayed at her bedside, gently placing my hand on her head. I didn’t know how to pray, what to ask.

We had done everything medically that could be done. Our surgery would be successful and the physical part of her problem would be healed, but that was minimal compared to her overall suffering. Only God’s love for this woman could give her any comfort.

So I prayed a verse that came to mind. I prayed that God would give her a peace surpassing all human understanding that would guard her heart and mind in Jesus Christ.

I finished my prayer and stood by her bed, looking down at her face. I thought of what she had been through and wondered how long she would suffer before she realized the peace of God.

I walked through the other wards. Most of the patients were asleep. I could not speak Creole nor understand it. I would stop at the foot of certain beds and give a nod at patients I had gotten to know. They didn’t try to speak. I would stand a few minutes looking at them and ask God to give them that same peace that only He could give. I would touch their foot or pat their leg and stand with them a moment just to let them know that, even though I wouldn’t see them again here on earth, I cared.

I stopped at the first bed in the second ward. The patient had pulled his sheet up over his face. He was one of my favorite patients and I wanted to see him, but I didn’t want to awaken him. He was a large man, a policeman in his mid-thirties. We had put some metal pins through the broken bones on his right leg and then stabilized it with an external brace.

When the quake hit, he was at home with his wife and two young daughters. His wife was giving the girls a bath. He was trapped for two days, not knowing whether his wife and children were alive. Even when some men found him and pounded the concrete off his body to free him, he didn’t know. He didn’t know for sure they had died until he looked back at the rest of the house and saw that the roof slab had completely crushed the bathroom portion of his house.

He had been with us three days in the hospital but didn’t speak much to anybody. I can only imagine what was going through his mind. I can’t imagine how I would react if my wife and children were suddenly taken away from me.

A few beds down was a man with a 3-year-old son who had lost part of his arm. The man’s wife and two children had died. He kept telling me through the interpreter that his wife was 32 years old. Just 32, he kept saying. I remember him sitting and holding his boy all day in his lap as if he wanted to make certain he didn’t lose him. We had tried to discharge him earlier in the day, but he had no money and nowhere to go. At least at the hospital, they received one meal a day. We needed his bed for other patients but couldn’t make him leave.

I walked on to the next ward and saw another patient who had touched my life, a 9-year-old girl. Her father was asleep on the bare floor beside her.

The little girl was at school when the quake hit, and she was trapped beneath slabs of concrete and rubble. Her father immediately went to look for her but couldn’t find her. He told me that all night long he kept poking his flashlight into little crevices between the concrete slabs stacked upon each other. He would call out his daughter’s name, but there was no answer. The next morning, when it was light, he still had to use his flashlight to see between the chunks of rubble. He kept calling her name and looking for her.

It was early afternoon when he found her. He said, “She recognized my voice and began yelling for me.” It took him and his son three more days to break the steel- reinforced concrete from around her body.

The little girl had a broken pelvis and a crushed right leg that may be paralyzed. But she is alive. Her father was so proud that he saved his daughter’s life because he knew there were hundreds of students in her class who were still buried and will never be saved.

I remember her father smiling each time I passed by her bed. On one occasion, I noticed he was holding a New Testament given to him by chaplains from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. His index finger was stuck between some pages. When I stopped and asked what the Bible was about, he immediately opened it and pointed to a verse—John 3:16. It was his daughter’s favorite verse, he said. I nodded and smiled at him and his daughter, before I went on to the operating room.

Their story reminds me of John chapter 10 where Jesus said that His sheep recognize His voice and follow Him. I will never read that passage the same again because I will always see the girl who recognized her father’s voice and was saved.

I next stopped by the bed of a lady whose broken leg had been repaired several days earlier. As I stood beside her, I could see her awake and smiling up at me. I remembered such a different look as we were rolling her into the OR. She had an open wound that needed debridement, and then we were planning to put in two pins above the break and two below it to provide stabilize the fracture.

After getting the sterile drape over her leg and preparing the instruments to begin the procedure, I could hear her speaking in Creole to the anesthesiologist. When I asked what she had said, I was told that she wanted to know if we were going to take her leg off.

It was only then I realized that, in the urgency of the moment, we had not taken time to track down an interpreter and explain to the patient what we were planning to do. I saw that we as surgeons had focused on the physical problem and completely ignored the emotional need. How could we disregard such an important part of caring for patients?

This lady had taught me that, no matter how successful I am as a surgeon, I have failed as a physician if I do not take care of the whole patient. Her forgiving smile is one I will recall forever as a humbling reminder that I am responsible for a patient’s feelings as well as any injury or sickness that patient may have. My only communication of gratitude for what she taught me was a smile and a nod as I left her bedside.

Three beds down was a 70-year-old lady who had been trapped for over 24 hours before they rescued her. I could only imagine the apprehension she went through at her age. I remember having her sit on the stretcher and bend forward as the anesthesiologist stuck the needle in her back to give her spinal anesthesia.

She kept repeating one word over and over all the while the needle was inserted and the injection given. As we laid her down, the repeated word got quieter and quieter until it was only a whisper by the time she lay flat on the operating table. When I asked what word she was saying, the interpreter replied, “She kept saying Jesus.”

For some reason, I began to think of the end times. How much suffering and pain there will be. I wondered if certain people would repeat that Name over and over as this lady did.

As I stood by her bed that last night, I thought about what I learned from her—that in times of trouble Jesus is the first one I will turn to and call upon. And in my heart, I thanked that elderly lady for reminding me of such an important truth for my life.

As I looked farther down the ward, I saw another lady I had come to know. She had begun to run as soon as she felt the house shake. Somehow she knew it was an earthquake. She almost made it out, but a portion of concrete wall caught her left leg just above her ankle and tore flesh away down to bone.

She was taken to the government hospital and placed in a plaster cast, hoping to save her leg later with an operation. But it was nine days later before she came to our hospital. We gave her a spinal block for anesthesia and placed her on the operating table to remove the packing of gauze stuffed in her wound.

It was immediately obvious that her distal tibia was non-viable. We told the interpreter to ask permission to amputate her leg. The patient began to nod affirmatively wholeheartedly. There were no tears, no grimace, only the repeated nod. It was evident she had already gone through enough pain and suffering. She wanted relief at any cost, even to remove her leg.

That last night at the hospital, I realized as I stood by her bed how much more peaceful she looked since her leg was amputated. And I thought about the death of my older brother. He had leukemia and suffered terribly before he died. I thought of his last words to the nurse who came to examine him during the last night of his life. She told me he looked at her and said: “I am ready to go home.”

I think sometimes pain and suffering prepares our minds for the inevitable—whether it’s dying or losing a leg. I don’t know about this lady, but being a believer made that decision a lot more peaceful for my brother. The thought that suffering makes some decisions easier ran through my mind as I left her and looked for other patients who had taught me other life lessons.

As I passed through the ward, I noticed a mother in the bed with her little girl. Both were asleep. The children are the worst. You just feel so bad that they have to go through something like this at their age. I can’t help but think of my grandchildren when I see the ones their age in the hospital.

I remembered that the first time I saw that little girl, I was afraid she was going to lose her foot. She had only a single block fall on it, but it damaged so much tissue around the open bone.

Perhaps we should have amputated when we first saw the injury, but we kept thinking there might be some way of getting the wound clean enough to swing a flap over the bone. Sadly, I looked at the bandaged distal stump of her leg, grim evidence that we had to come to the conclusion two days ago that there was no way to save her foot.

As I sit here in the plane, I realize we will have to go back in a few months with prosthetic devices for all the amputations that have been performed. That will be for thousands who have had feet amputated or legs taken off above or below their knee. I remind myself there will still be a lot to be done long after the stories are off the television and nothing is printed about them in the newspaper. I know our work is not finished in Haiti.

As I continued walking down the hall, my mind went back to the drive I had from our hospital on the outskirts of town to the government hospital downtown.

We passed a body lying in the gutter. Someone had laid a piece of plastic over it, and all you could see were the feet sticking out one end and the top of the scalp out the other.

A little farther down the road, I saw a single building that had fallen out over the street and covered half the road. As we passed by in the only lane left open, I saw an automobile had been crushed down to within two feet of the ground. Then I noticed a hand sticking out from under the roof of the car and asked our driver to stop.

As I looked closer, I could see that the driver of the smashed car must have gotten out somehow. But the body whose hand I saw was that of the passenger—a lady frozen in death, her body lying across the seat as she reached for the driver’s door. It was as if time has stood still from the moment of the quake. I knew she had not died instantly, probably because the automobile roof had lightened the load of the slab somewhat and given her time to at least attempt to get out.

The situation had been much different for the victim I saw next. Just behind the car, a bicycle wheel was protruding from under the same slab. I bent down to look under the rubble and saw the body of a man in a uniform crushed beside what was left of the bicycle. I could see his arm completely. It had not been crushed at all. His khaki short-sleeved shirt with stripes around the sleeve was all intact. But his head was crushed and his shoulders were bent completely together and I knew he had died in a moment.

I couldn’t help but think of things that happen in the twinkling of an eye. The woman in the car and the man on the bicycle were simply going down the road—and in a moment, their lives were taken.

It is strange what runs through our minds when we see the unusual. Such thoughts brand themselves on our minds. As I was bent over looking under the slab at the man on the bike, I thought that we had better be prepared right now for our lives to come to an end because we don’t know if we will have a tomorrow or not.

Parts of Bible verses came to mind. I didn’t remember the exact passages that related to what I was thinking at the time but looked them up later. “Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is our life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes” (James 4:14). The man on the bicycle was alive one moment, and the next was gone.

First Corinthians 15 speaks to such a time when our bodies are brought back to life: “We shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed” (15:51-52).

That phrase—“in the twinkling of an eye”—was what ran though my mind when I first saw the man on the bicycle. I was moved in a way I will never forget. If there are individuals who do not know the Lord, they need to come face to face with the fact that tomorrow is not guaranteed. They can make any decision they want, but they must decide one way or another. And the other thought that crossed my mind: What about the friends I have that I do not know if they are believers or not. I should talk to them about the Lord before tomorrow.

That last night in Haiti, as I left the hospital, I remember the heaviness in my heart even though I don’t consider myself an emotional person. I knew we had done our best, but there was still that feeling of inadequacy.

Walking toward the main door out of the hospital, I had to pass by eight or ten people lying on mattresses placed on the floor to one side of the hall. These were the new overflow patients who had been admitted that morning. One came by taxi, one by bus, both with broken limbs.

Asleep on the last mattress was an elderly man with white curly hair. He had two broken legs and was all alone. Ten days after the quake, he still didn’t know where his family was or if they were even alive. And they had no knowledge of his condition or whereabouts. He knew one family member had a phone but couldn’t remember the number. I pulled the Samaritan’s Purse blanket up around his shoulders and left the hospital.

Now, as I’m flying back home, I think back. In the weeks to come, thoughts and feelings will gel in my mind but right now I am having trouble not crying—and I haven’t cried since my mother died years ago. So many lives were saved, yet there were so many we never even had a chance to treat.

Looking back, I thought of the differences in our medical team from most of the rest I saw working in Haiti.

There were many doctors and surgeons from all over the world serving in Haiti, as well as surgical, OR, and ER nurses. There were many different organizations providing emergency medical care, including the Israeli military, which had the most impressive mobile field hospital I’ve ever seen.

All the doctors who responded to this disaster had one goal in mind and that is to save lives. That’s why we all went. And I think we all were able to do just that. But there has to be more to it than that. There has to be more to it than to extend these people’s lives a month or a year.

My thoughts keep going back to this morning’s planning session before our team started work at the hospital. The surgery schedule and the patients to be discharged were discussed. The long-term plan for the complicated cases was brought up.

Then the chaplain’s report was given—and that’s what keeps running through my mind. The report came from a Billy Graham Evangelistic Association chaplain who had been on the ground with our medical team since the third day after the quake. From the beginning, the chaplains have prayed with and given encouragement to every patient at the hospital. He reported that every patient who was not a believer, except for one person, had accepted the Lord Jesus Christ during the past week.

I wonder why we have to go through tragedies and troubles and disappointments in our lives before we get a right relationship with the Lord.

When I think about all the ones who didn’t make it, it brings to mind the story of Noah and the ark. When all who were going to be saved were aboard, the verse in Genesis reads, “And the door was shut.” No one who was not aboard would be saved.

Of the thousands who died in Haiti—and so many of them are still buried in the rubble—how many of them were not saved? How many of them were not on the ark when the door was shut? I have to wonder because I keep thinking of the ones who were taken out in the twinkling of an eye.

Hearing that chaplain’s report was a great reminder why our team went. I am comforted to know that it was to do more than extend lives for a few more months or years. It was to extend lives for eternity.

I find comfort in knowing that the chaplains prayed with each patient on the wards and presented them with God’s plan of salvation. I also find comfort in knowing that the surgeons prayed with patients prior to operating on them, not only to ask for wisdom for that particular medical procedure, but also to present a witness to those patients that their surgeons believed in Someone greater than themselves to look to in times of crisis.

As I look back, I realize that our hospital was used like a magnet to draw those patients in and that our medical team was used as a tool for evangelism.

This experience has given me new insight in understanding the difference between the physical and the spiritual. I saw the physical bodies that were caught under concrete slabs, resulting in broken bones and tissue injuries. Those physical bodies we treated or operated on.

However, the reality is that each one of those bodies we operated on will someday die and be buried. Now I understand so much more about each patient’s soul and spirit, which will never die but will live for eternity.

I have come to a real understanding of what makes our medical team different. We came to Haiti not just to extend people’s physical lives, but to point the way to eternal life through faith in Jesus Christ.

Helping people is not our goal. Jesus is our goal.

Samaritan's Purse , Haiti , Help for Haiti , Dr. Dick Furman: A Surgeon’s Reflections