"Nature always surprises us," said Claude Fuilla, the head medic with a French civil defense team in Haiti which pulled young Darlene Etienne from a collapsed building in the capital Port-au-Prince Wednesday.

Neighbors found Etienne and alerted international rescuers who dug her out. She was stable but suffering from advanced dehydration and is now being treated on the French naval vessel Siroco, which is anchored off the Haitian coast.

"I am incapable of explaining it medically, but she told me this morning that she didn't eat anything, didn't drink anything and was trapped in the initial earthquake" on January 12, said Evelyne Lambert, the chief doctor on board the Siroco.

The girl is doing well and has managed to sleep, the doctor said.

"She has problems due to her prolonged immobilization, her legs are painful but she has managed to move them," Lambert added.

The first rescuers to reach Etienne initially thought she may have had access to soft drinks, but found no bottles at the scene when they checked later, doctors said.

"There were potentially some trickles of water," said Fuilla, adding that this had not been confirmed. "When you review the literature, a hydrological fast longer than 10 days is extremely unusual."

Doctors feared that her heart might stop at any moment because she was in such a sever state of dehydration when she was found.

"To my knowledge, she is one of the most extreme cases of survival," added Colonel Michel Orcel, a medic and veteran of natural disasters who runs the French field hospital in Port-au-Prince that treated Etienne immediately after her rescue.

Rescuers have saved around 135 people from the debris since the 7.0-magnitude quake laid waste to much of Port-au-Prince and surviving towns. The government says around 170,000 were killed, at least 200,000 injured and a million left homeless.

Etienne's ability to survive was partly down to luck, but also showed the sheer adaptability of the human body in times of crisis, doctors said.

"Physically she was very thin, but that is not inevitably a drawback as there is not much water in fat," said Orcel.

"The key comes from the brain which gradually adapts to the situation. It reduces the blood pressure and the kidneys partially shut down," he said.

While the average person should consume around 1,500 calories a day, Darlene was probably only eating around an average of 300, like many in one of the western hemisphere's poorest nations.

"There is always a limit but the body is capable of reducing its needs for survival," said Orcel.

Victims generally fall into a state of hibernation, which makes them intermittently lose consciousness and allows them to pull through, he added.

"I heard about a guy who was rescued almost three weeks after the earthquake in Agadir," Orcel said, referring to a quake in Morocco in 1960 in which 12,000 people died.

"He was in a cellar and was able to eat and drink but he had become crazy because he stayed completely conscious and knew he was buried alive."

In Darlene's case, doctors are confident in her ability to recover.

"It will not be too long, we have to wait for her renal functions to return. It will take four days and she is in the best hands possible," Orcel added.

For now she has not had any contact with her family.

"No one showed up," said Lambert.

Asked what would happen to her in the future, Fuilla joked: "Maybe she will get married to one of her 'super-rescuers' from civil defense. That would be a fairytale ending."

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