Family members carry the body of 15-year-old Fabienne Geichmar after she was fatally shot while looting in downtown Port au Prince following the earthquake on January 12, 2010.

Susan Scott, a traveling certified registered nurse anesthetist, explained to her patient that she would need an IV.

But the patient already knew the drill.

The Haitian woman, who traveled more than 100 miles from Port-au-Prince, Haiti to the mission in Ouanaminthe, Haiti where Scott was volunteering, explained that she had an IV when she delivered her child.

“I asked if her baby was OK,” Scott said. “She said her baby died in the earthquake.”

The image of the woman cemented in Scott’s memory as she administered drugs and doctors treated the patient’s severe foot injury, a result of the earthquake that devastated Haiti on Jan. 12.

Scott, who is the wife of Western music professor Bill Scott, has now returned home from working in Haiti. She’s found herself wondering if any set of images or any series of words can truly convey the catastrophic aftermath of the disaster.

Scott, with her family’s support, volunteered for the trip after receiving an e-mail from the Kentucky Association of Nurse Anesthetists.

“When she talked to me, I said, ‘I don’t have a problem with you going as long as you get home safe,’” Bill Scott said.

Susan Scott arrived in Haiti on Jan. 27 and spent about a week at the medical center in Ouanaminthe.

“All the pictures that you see, there’s no way you can conceive of the tragedy by looking at those pictures,” she said.

But 2007 Western photojournalism graduate Ed Linsmier felt called to capture images that told the heartbreaking story.

Linsmier had visited Haiti about 10 times prior to the earthquake with a non-profit organization in Florida and left his home and obligations in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. for the country for which he cared the weekend after the earthquake.

He was unable to photograph one of the most powerful moments of his trip. But he doesn’t need a picture to remember what he saw while riding on the back of a motorbike through that Haitian night.

“It was a totally apocalyptic scene,” he said “It was a scene of complete destruction and fires burning and people sleeping in the street.”

Linsmier said he saw looters shot in the street and mass graves filling the city, and he eventually began taking small, intimate images that suited his personal style, rather than pictures that could sum up the scene for newspapers.

But he said it is possible for photographs to help portray the suffering in Haiti.

“Is that something?” he said. “I don’t think so, but I think I did my part. I think I did the best I could do.”