Jan Gurley, MD

Reflections of a recent trip to Haiti to provide care, with a video meant to help fight cholera -please pass it along.

Line 'em up and take a count: Mehmet Oz, Nancy Snyderman, Manny Alvarez, Atul Gawande, and Sanjay Gupta (surgeon, surgeon, surgeon, surgeon, and...oh wait, what a surprise...surgeon).

We've entered a new arena of horror where our Richter scale, for the first time, doesn't seem to reach high enough, and adjectives are crumbling under the impact. "Devastation" or "catastrophe"? None of the usual descriptors feel powerful enough.

How quickly we humans normalize even the most extreme scenario - as long as we see it over and over. By now, it seems perfectly normal for our fringed-draped bus to 4-wheel it over piles of rubble.

Even the predawn day began a little differently. The shrill distant stadium cheers of hundreds of Haitian roosters sounded oddly synchronized, as though perhaps they were doing the wave.

After six hours of unaccustomed sleep, I awoke like a mad pirate, with one red eye, hair askew, lurching and croaking.

There's something about the constant drone of a generator – the relentless, unremitting growl that hangs in the air. It's like the smell and the dust and the fear of the rainy season, the way it creeps under your skin so quickly, and then sinks so deepely that you're not even aware that you're aware of it. All the time.

Immediately after crossing from the DR into Haiti, you can see the visible downshift into a worse level of poverty.

Airports are bland portals scattered across the world. It's really when you step outside, walking down the cattle-chute ramp that's lined with well-wishers and people holding up hand-written signs - it's as you emerge, blinking into hot haze and the smell of moist, marinating diesel hits you, that's when you know you're somewhere else.

If you look at the photo of what finally went into my personal bag to Haiti, it's hard to imagine how much thought and fretting and, frankly, geometric calculation was involved.