Village Journals
Resonate your identity with Naseeb journals. Express your opinions, share your thoughts, post your writings and connect with like minded people through the power of expression.
Resonate your identity with Naseeb journals. Express your opinions, share your thoughts, post your writings and connect with like minded people through the power of expression.
WE NEED NURSES - A BANKNOTE WON'T DRESS A WOUND
An e-mail I received;
Nurses from UFT are world renowned.
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Professor Sahibzada is head of orthopaedics and trauma at Ayub Hospital, Abbottabad.
He trained in Dundee and Edinburgh.
www.timesonline.co.uk
----------
The Times October 15, 2005
?We need nurses. A banknote can't dress a wound?
By Catherine Philp
The desperate search for people trapped by the Kashmir earthquake ended yesterday and the focus has now shifted to known survivors. Here, Professor Sohail Sahibzada, a British-trained doctor at a hospital near the epicentre, talks to our correspondent about his work amid the carnage
WE HAD just started the morning theatre list. The earth shook once. Then it began shaking wildly. People were wailing. I was scared, scared for my children. I was terrified that they had been flattened.
NI_MPU('middle');
I came out to the car park and there was mayhem going on. I ran home. When I found my family were all safe I said: ?Look after yourselves, you won?t see me for two days.? Then I had time to pray. I held the pillar and I prayed for God to give me strength.
I got back to the hospital and I said: ?It isn?t safe for us to stay inside. We will have to make a theatre outside.? I called my boys and I said: ?It?s going to be terrible. There will be thousands of casualties.? There weren?t many people left at the hospital, about 200 who knew what to do.
We took everything outside, all the medicines and the beds and sent all of our previous patients home. Some had already run away. T
hen the onslaught from
Abbottabad began. By afternoon we had run out of equipment, so we broke into a shop and took all the medicine. We brought out the theatre tables and put screens around and started to amputate the limbs. The other injuries we lined up like a production line; wash clean, tetanus. By afternoon we?d run out of tetanus shots and drugs to control gangrene. We were overrun.
The injured had started coming in from nearby villages. The saddest thing I saw were young girls who had been paralysed. They had been inside when the quake struck and didn?t know what had hit them. There was one boy, you could see his brain. We managed to save him. By 10pm the local people came to cook food for the injured and we had plastic sheeting above their heads. Then suddenly from nowhere ? and that?s when I thought it was biblical ? this nasty storm came. It was like God?s curse. We were holding the tents up so the water would flow off but the patients were getting soaked. So we had to move them inside again.
At 3am I went home thinking I?d get an hour or so of sleep. My wife and children were sleeping in the car because they were afraid. At 4am there was an enormous jolt and they woke up screaming. I came back to the hospital and it was mayhem. It was like you?d lined up dominoes and someone had shaken them and you had to start again. The place was filled with patients.
I was just following my nose to find the worst injured, shouting: ?Take him up!? By then, there were hundreds coming in from farther afield and we needed all the space we could to operate. The staff were too afraid to get back into the ground theatre so I said: ?Who are cowards? To the left! Who are God-fearing people? To the right.? By evening we had two theatres operating. After 36 hours I had laryngitis from shouting at everyone.
The next day we managed to start shifting people out by ambulance and helicopter so we could take in more injured from the field. That day I heard that my best friend had been killed in Balakot. So I had my own grief to handle, too. I felt guilty because he was going to be transferred, but he didn?t want to leave Balakot because he loved it, so I helped him to stay.
But when you see 16 young girls who are paraplegic, what is one death? I?ve seen 60 paraplegics; I?ve amputated both legs off a tiny child. The women and the children are the worst wounded because they were inside. The women wanted to be covered before they came out, because they are very modest here.
The people we are seeing now are from the remote villages, all limb injuries. The others all died. Many of those we are getting now, their wounds are infected; we?re starting to get gangrene now because they?ve been without treatment for many days. Even after six days, a helicopter can land without warning with 30 casualties on board. It?s like being on a battlefield. What do we need? We need doctors, we need nurses by the thousand. You can?t dress a wound with a banknote, you need a person.?
Professor Sahibzada is head of orthopaedics and trauma at Ayub Hospital, Abbottabad.
He trained in Dundee and Edinburgh.
?4M RAISED
About ?4 million was raised in a celebrity-led televised phone-in for the earthquake victims on Thursday. It takes the total figure raised by the Disasters Emergency Committee to more than ?9 million. Donations can be made at all high street banks and post offices.
==================
Nurses from UFT are world renowned.
==================
Professor Sahibzada is head of orthopaedics and trauma at Ayub Hospital, Abbottabad.
He trained in Dundee and Edinburgh.
www.timesonline.co.uk
----------
The Times October 15, 2005
?We need nurses. A banknote can't dress a wound?
By Catherine Philp
The desperate search for people trapped by the Kashmir earthquake ended yesterday and the focus has now shifted to known survivors. Here, Professor Sohail Sahibzada, a British-trained doctor at a hospital near the epicentre, talks to our correspondent about his work amid the carnage
WE HAD just started the morning theatre list. The earth shook once. Then it began shaking wildly. People were wailing. I was scared, scared for my children. I was terrified that they had been flattened.
NI_MPU('middle');
I came out to the car park and there was mayhem going on. I ran home. When I found my family were all safe I said: ?Look after yourselves, you won?t see me for two days.? Then I had time to pray. I held the pillar and I prayed for God to give me strength.
I got back to the hospital and I said: ?It isn?t safe for us to stay inside. We will have to make a theatre outside.? I called my boys and I said: ?It?s going to be terrible. There will be thousands of casualties.? There weren?t many people left at the hospital, about 200 who knew what to do.
We took everything outside, all the medicines and the beds and sent all of our previous patients home. Some had already run away. T
hen the onslaught from
Abbottabad began. By afternoon we had run out of equipment, so we broke into a shop and took all the medicine. We brought out the theatre tables and put screens around and started to amputate the limbs. The other injuries we lined up like a production line; wash clean, tetanus. By afternoon we?d run out of tetanus shots and drugs to control gangrene. We were overrun.
The injured had started coming in from nearby villages. The saddest thing I saw were young girls who had been paralysed. They had been inside when the quake struck and didn?t know what had hit them. There was one boy, you could see his brain. We managed to save him. By 10pm the local people came to cook food for the injured and we had plastic sheeting above their heads. Then suddenly from nowhere ? and that?s when I thought it was biblical ? this nasty storm came. It was like God?s curse. We were holding the tents up so the water would flow off but the patients were getting soaked. So we had to move them inside again.
At 3am I went home thinking I?d get an hour or so of sleep. My wife and children were sleeping in the car because they were afraid. At 4am there was an enormous jolt and they woke up screaming. I came back to the hospital and it was mayhem. It was like you?d lined up dominoes and someone had shaken them and you had to start again. The place was filled with patients.
I was just following my nose to find the worst injured, shouting: ?Take him up!? By then, there were hundreds coming in from farther afield and we needed all the space we could to operate. The staff were too afraid to get back into the ground theatre so I said: ?Who are cowards? To the left! Who are God-fearing people? To the right.? By evening we had two theatres operating. After 36 hours I had laryngitis from shouting at everyone.
The next day we managed to start shifting people out by ambulance and helicopter so we could take in more injured from the field. That day I heard that my best friend had been killed in Balakot. So I had my own grief to handle, too. I felt guilty because he was going to be transferred, but he didn?t want to leave Balakot because he loved it, so I helped him to stay.
But when you see 16 young girls who are paraplegic, what is one death? I?ve seen 60 paraplegics; I?ve amputated both legs off a tiny child. The women and the children are the worst wounded because they were inside. The women wanted to be covered before they came out, because they are very modest here.
The people we are seeing now are from the remote villages, all limb injuries. The others all died. Many of those we are getting now, their wounds are infected; we?re starting to get gangrene now because they?ve been without treatment for many days. Even after six days, a helicopter can land without warning with 30 casualties on board. It?s like being on a battlefield. What do we need? We need doctors, we need nurses by the thousand. You can?t dress a wound with a banknote, you need a person.?
Professor Sahibzada is head of orthopaedics and trauma at Ayub Hospital, Abbottabad.
He trained in Dundee and Edinburgh.
?4M RAISED
About ?4 million was raised in a celebrity-led televised phone-in for the earthquake victims on Thursday. It takes the total figure raised by the Disasters Emergency Committee to more than ?9 million. Donations can be made at all high street banks and post offices.
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