Reporter/guest blogger Joe Burris has the latest in our series of updates from Maryland medical teams working in Haiti:

On her first day in earthquake ravaged Haiti, Dr. Rana Hamdy discovered that a patient she had seen upon arrival had subsequently died -- a teenage boy in need of dialysis whose life she knew was in jeopardy after noticing he was urinating blood.

Shortly before she departed, an expectant mother had gone into labor, and she bemoaned being unable to witness the birth.

Between the pendulum swing from death to life, the Johns Hopkins third-year pediatrics resident sometimes spent more than 20 hours each day aiding victims of the tragedy that has killed an estimated 200,000 Haitians while leaving thousands injured.

The Baltimore resident was among six Johns Hopkins pediatric residents who visited Haiti as part of a tropical medicine elective in the Hopkins School of Medicine’s pediatric residency program. Most of the group arrived around 2 a.m. on the Saturday after the Jan. 12 quake and immediately were set to work on patients in the United Nations compound hospital adjacent to the airport.

Hamby joined two other residents, Dr. Delphine Robotham of Baltimore and Jennifer Webb of Washington, D.C., in recounting their experiences after returning from Haiti on Thursday. The program is led by Johns Hopkins Children’s Hospital Center emergency physician Dr. Karen Schneider, who is still in Haiti.

She said that the death of the teenager -- the first of five deaths she witnessed -- motivated her to work harder to get patients the care they needed.

“The hardest part was knowing that if we had gotten him on a plane to Miami he might have survived. We knew what he needed, we just couldn’t get him what he needed,” she said. “After that, we tried our best to advocate getting the patients transferred.”

All three residents said that they are better doctors because of the trip.