Poet nurse recounts life with mentally ill patients

Soon after the Wenchuan earthquake in May 2008, An Xuerong and some of her colleagues went to a quake-hit town in Dujiangyan, Sichuan province, to bring some 80 mentally ill patients to their hospital - Chengdu No 4 Hospital, one of the largest hospitals for people suffering from mental illnesses in Southwest China.

The local hospital where the patients were lodged was damaged in the magnitude-8.0 earthquake, which killed nearly 70,000 and left 18,000 missing.

"The patients cooperated and went to Chengdu with us calmly. In a major calamity, even mental patients wanted to survive. Only a few patients refused to leave their hospital," says An as she lights a cigarette in a teahouse near her hospital.