Today, she is a double amputee. She lost an arm and a leg, but nothing stopped her from smiling and she was absolutely determined to finish her education and become a nurse.

"I fell over and the dresser fell on my forearm and my foot got caught under it. I was there for a whole day underneath it," the 24-year-old said.

Darling, a first year philosophy student, was brought out from under the rubble by an emergency team who took her to hospital where her leg was immediately amputated all the way past her knee.

"I thought it was a dream, a nightmare, as though I was asleep," she said.

She called the cousins she lives with in the capital Port-au-Prince without knowing that one of them had also been trapped beneath the rubble of their house, unable to hear her.

"God saved my life," she whispered, laid out on a hospital bed.

But two weeks after her rescue, doctors had to deliver some bad news.

"We couldn't save her arm, there was a risk of septicemia," said Phillipe Borlut, who works for the emergency care unit set up in a hospital in Canape-vert, a Port-au-Prince neighborhood.

Doctors bustled around her, preparing to take out her stitches. A little groggy from sedatives, she protested slightly, but then embraced the whole group.

"When Darling left the operating room, she asked us all to hug her and we all hugged her," Borlut said. "It's not my most joyful memory, but it is the most moving," he added.

"If God gives me the chance to have a prosthetic foot and a prosthetic arm, I would be happy," Darling said, smiling. "I don't know if will help me regain my arm and leg so that I can be a nurse."

"I don't like to see people suffering. I want to help my country and save the sick."

Therese Exinor, Darling's mother, confirmed her daughter's dream of being a nurse. Exinor lives in the countryside with three other children, but she sent Darling to the capital to study.

"There is no money" to buy prosthetics, she said, shaking her head.

"She wants to become a nurse, but without an arm, without a leg, I don't know how she can be one," she sighed.

Exinor left her home and her other children to come to Darling's bedside as soon as she heard her daughter had been pulled alive, but seriously injured, from the rubble.

The pair are now living in a small tent set up in the gardens of the hospital, where dozen of patients and their families lie on mattresses or just on the ground, in need of hospital rooms that simply are not available.

In town to comfort her daughter, Exinor finds herself relying on her daughter's positive attitude.

"Darling is very encouraging. She says to me 'Mama, don't cry. I'm just fine.'"

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