MY SECRET MISSION TO SAVE ALEPPO’S BABIES OF THE BLITZ
In a deeply personal and inspirational dispatch from a field hospital at a secret location in Syria, the heroic war surgeon, right, reveals his most heartbreaking mercy dash
OF ALL the wounded children of Aleppo who have passed before me, the memory of one has lodged in my mind like no other. Maram. I spent the week before Christmas in a field hospital in Syria operating on many tiny souls see-sawing between life and death, their bodies being held together with metal pins and scaffold-like fixators.
But in Maram, a five-month-old orphan and beautiful despite her injuries, I saw my own child and, perhaps because I missed her so desperately, I felt intensely overwhelmed.
I have made numerous trips to Syria to treat the casualties of this war, but none was as sorrowful as the week I spent with Aleppo’s children.
Bone-weary and drained emotionally, I returned to my home in London on Christmas Eve and just couldn’t wait to hold my own 17-month-old daughter and see my wife and family. Christmas was a joy. Yet Maram was never far from my mind’s eye: a haunting, residual memory that I could not have shaken even if I had wished to.
I find myself waking in the early hours worrying about her.
I first saw Maram on December 20, a few days after she was evacuated from Aleppo in an ambulance.
Her legs and left arm were shattered in a bomb attack that killed her parents and injured her brother and sister.
Pieces of ordnance shell were embedded in her infected wounds but, because the Aleppo doctors had run out of dressings, disinfectant and saline, they had no choice but to operate as best they could on her dirty body tissue.
As I looked down at Maram on the treatment table she was crying, not because she was tired and hungry, even though she was both, but because she was in great pain.
There are no paediatricians in Aleppo, or at the hospital where I was working; nobody qualified to make the very difficult decisions about how much analgesics and fluids to dispense. So in spite of all her suffering, Maram was simply on a small dose of paracetamol.
It was heartbreaking. I checked her charts. If this was a hospital in Europe, these would have been filled in with scrupulous attention to detail but in Syria, with doctors battling to save the lives of so many, the charts were overlooked.
I couldn’t even tell what medication she had already received. Maram wriggled uncomfortably. I tried to think logically about how to help her and what I’d need to do when I operated on her the following day.
But precise thought was difficult as I felt myself experiencing the same sort of emotions that any father would have towards a wounded child.
I operated on December 21, carefully debriding Maram’s wounds and removing the decaying tissue inside her. The whole hospital stank of the bacteria that had caused her infections, and those in other patients.
I worked delicately around the open compound fracture Maram had suffered in her left leg.
Correctly in my opinion, the surgeon who had operated on her in Aleppo had applied an external fixator, but this was so big and heavy that Maram couldn’t move her leg when she was awake.
IT WAS so sad to see. She also had a pin in her femur and another in her tibia, and she had a really big gap of leg bone missing from the explosion. I often wonder what life was like for Maram and her family when Aleppo, the most benighted city on earth, was relentlessly pounded by bombs from above.
On the night I first saw Maram, I encountered other children injured in the same attack. Some had already been operated on and had limbs amputated.
Towards the end of the siege of Aleppo, doctors were conducting amputations on anyone with a serious injury.
Due to flesh-eating infections and a lack of basic supplies, they simply didn’t have a choice.
Another tragedy was that many of the local people had stopped donating blood to the hospitals because they were so scared of getting injured themselves and not having enough of a reserve blood
supply. This meant no blood supplies in the hospitals in Aleppo.
So any casualties brought in from the bombings who arrived bleeding profusely and needing transfusions couldn’t be treated; instead, they just died on the floor. In all that week, I treated 110 children. Yesterday I heard Maram has been taken to an unspecified specialist unit in Turkey.
Good news, but she has no parents and no-one to look after her.
Even if she recovers from her injuries, she is likely to be placed in an orphanage somewhere in Turkey.
I hope somebody reading this article is inspired to attempt to adopt her, because she needs so much love and cuddles and care after what she went through in Aleppo.
But I know how complicated it would be, legally and politically, to make that happen.
While I was in Syria there was talk of an airlift to rescue the most badly wounded children from Syria to take them to safety.
This was eventually shelved due to complications but if there was just one child that could be brought out of there, I would want it to be Maram; not just because she’s lost her parents and because her older siblings are also wounded and are too young to look after her, but due to the nature of the treatment she requires.
Maram might be able to get that treatment in Turkey but I don’t know. For the extensive orthopaedic management she needs, she should be fast-tracked to a western hospital.
She needs to be repaired psychologically as well as physically. She needs expert care. But still she is one of the lucky ones.
She made it out of Aleppo alive.
Of all the wounded children I have treated, I cannot shake off the haunting memory of baby Maram. Where is she now?