Bajwa took a helicopter to the Jhelum Valley in the Himalayan Mountains to reach several villages so remote that, despite it being a couple weeks after the catastrophic tremor that measured 7.6 on the Richter scale, they still hadn't received any medical attention.

  In a diary kept during his 10 days in Pakistan, Bajwa offered honest and heartfelt commentary on the scenes of destruction that unfolded around him, including one entry about what he saw from the chopper as it climbed to its destination of 6,500 feet:

  "Entire hamlets all along the flanks of the mountains are just piles of rubble. The rare structures still standing have large, visible cracks running through them.

  "But the most frightening vision is of the huge cracks rendering the mountainside asunder. The sheer might of these cracks penetrating and tearing the shell of these mighty Himalayan foothills gives me pause and puts into scale the devastating power of the cataclysm. Mere human beings never had a chance against this power that has cracked entire hillsides open like a smashed watermelon."

  But the quake's impact grew more personal once Bajwa and another doctor landed and started treating the sick from 8 a.m. until past dark - as many as 300 patients a day - on a table set up outside next to a stream.

  "Fathers bring little children with beautiful, sad eyes, clinging to them, afraid of this stranger wearing surgical gloves," Bajwa wrote. "The parents, tenderly, always tenderly, console the little ones and kiss their grimy, tear-streaked, little angelic faces. Some kids warm up and even smile but I hesitate to linger too long, not so much out of fear of delaying treatment for the rest but more so to shield my own emotions."

  Bajwa said he not only treated the physical ailments of fractures and wounds (one old man walked hours on a broken hip to receive treatment), but he also sensed the psychological toll the natural disaster had taken on these rural people.

  "(The villagers) just need to tell someone how badly their hearts ache but these hardy, mountain folk are not given to displays of emotion at all," he wrote. "Quite to the contrary, Kashmiri after Kashmiri matter-of-factly describes the loss of so-and-so in their family, their kids, their siblings, parents, but in an eerily apathetic manner, a reflection of the unfathomable shock they've experienced."

  In the face of all this death ("There wasn't a single person who hadn't lost a family member," Bajwa said), the villagers showed an outpouring of gratitude toward the doctors and an appreciation for the lives that remained.

  Bajwa described a man and his family who lived in a makeshift dwelling made of tin and a tarp after their house had crumbled to the ground. Although it was Ramadan and they were preparing their first meal of the day after fasting for hours, the family insisted that they put off dinner and instead put on tea for Bajwa.

  "I could not refuse their offerings because that would have been a deep insult to this noble man's pride, which was clearly intact despite his loss of his sister, house and livestock," Bajwa said. "It was amazing to see people who had hardly anything left and what they did have left they were willing to share."

  In addition to writing in his journal for as long as his candles lasted, Bajwa also took many photographs. One of the more poignant pictures features a group of boys smiling, holding up a homemade cricket bat.

  "To see their glee and one boy I had just bandaged earlier is smiling the widest," Bajwa said Monday while sitting in his office at the new IRMC Medical Arts building.

  Returning to the States wasn't easy for Bajwa, as this life-altering experience has humbled him.

  "It was hard to come back," he said. "I felt guilty for leaving but there's no end to it. I could stay forever. I feel guilty for coming back to my cushy life. I came back humbled by the fact that we rely so much on our comforts and that we complain about not wanting to walk the four steps to get the remote control."