Taking to the task
INCH-BASED DR EVE BRUCE HAS SPENT 40 YEARS AS A PLASTIC SURGEON, AND VOLUNTEERS REGULARLY IN WAR-TORN AND DISADVANTAGED COUNTRIES. SHE TELLS TADHG EVANS OF A LIFE LESS ORDINARY
EVE Bruce lives on an Inch hillside, a perch overlooking one of Ireland’s loveliest strands.
Going from such bliss to regions riddled by conflict and poverty – as she often does for Médecins Sans Frontières – takes a hell of a leap. When she leaves Inch for Afghanistan, Nigeria, or wherever she’s needed, she braces for a ‘normal’ of tending to injuries and disfigurements unimaginable to most.
Even with decades’ experience as a plastic surgeon, she’s not immune to the enormity of it all – and it’s a lesser-thought-of side of conflict that hits her hardest.
“It’s seeing the victims of torture I find toughest,” she says. “You can imagine civilians being injured in the middle of a war. But to imagine someone to strategically plan to harm someone over and over and torture them? It’s beyond my comprehension. It often takes a long time before they even talk about it.
“With torture and sexual abuse, the perpetrators have not just harmed somebody’s body – they’ve taken their humanity.
“They’ve made them an object.” It’s a calling less ordinary to follow a life less ordinary. Eve was brought up in Kenya before moving ‘ temporarily’ to Baltimore, the US – where she duly remained for 30 years.
Her mother’s family was Irish, and she became a regular visitor to these shores. Indeed it was here that she met her husband, putting her on course for West Kerry life.
Jumping from culture to culture has helped soften the transitions from our ‘normal’ to a far darker version of that word, but it doesn’t and can’t steel you entirely. For context, her first MSF mission was in a provincial hospital in Helmand, Afghanistan, and many of her patients had to wade through Taliban and government conflict to get the treatment they needed.
“I ran the burns unit there,” she says. “We weren’t allowed much movement, we couldn’t go for a walk, there were bombs all the time, bullets flying through... There are people there that have never known anything but war. It’s a very difficult place to live and raise a family and do the normal human things. It was also a beautiful country and the people are amazing.
I went there twice.
“I’ve also been to Northern Nigeria and dealt with a rare disease called Noma. It only happens in cases of severe, prolonged malnutrition. The only time it popped up in the last 200 years in Europe was in the Concentration Camps.
“A child, even an infant, might get a tooth abyss. It won’t heal, it turns into gangrene, and it’ll destroy the tissues in the face; 95 per cent die.
“But if they survive and haven’t had early intervention, which is very effective, they have big holes on their face. You can see into their sinus, or they lose their eye, or bone rots away. You hear stories of children in villages who are shunned or have to hide away.
“We work together over multiple operations, and you usually can’t get people to look exactly normal, but to have coverage and some balance in the face is huge. Some are adults and have lived their whole life without surgery. There’s no way they can get health care; they can’t even get a bowl of porridge.”
MSF’s purpose is to fill such healthcare gaps and decrease suffering, but the challenges it’s always faced are ever-sharpening. As Dre Eve words it, you often feel as though you’re travelling back 100 years when adjusting to the lack of resources available to medics relative to what they’d have in ‘developed’ countries.
All the while, MSF funds are limited and thinning as the need for their help only stretches. Refugee camps are growing worldwide – there are 1.5million Syrians camped in Jordan alone – and conflict burns on.
Dr Eve’s latest mission was to Amman, Jordan, for a 19-month spell as a medical director in a hospital built during the Iraq War. I
t was expected that its work would be temporary, but it’s still there today, nearly 15 years later; conflict has since torn through the Middle East, most tragically in Syria and Yemen.
“And we as a society have become almost inured to war,” she says.
“The patients who came to us in Jordan didn’t just suffer one trauma; they’d been traumatised over and over. They’d lost homes, families, hospitals, schools, communities. These people needed a lot of rehabilitation: mentally, spiritually, emotionally, physically.
“But it’s become a real problem that there’s so much going on that we can’t keep up with all that’s happening or protest at what’s happening.
“People affected by conflict need to feel like they’re moving forwards. Some will try to get across the Mediterranean, and they’ll sink. Or they end up in Lesbos, or they’re in another camp. They’re highly motivated and highly skilled, and there’s an opportunity there for other countries. But the other side of it is that no country has unlimited resources to help that. It’s a balancing act.
“What I will say about Ireland: I think my mother was very proud of the fact that Irish people, for the most part, don’t stick their heads in the sand... they care.
“They care about the underdog, they care about people who are suffering. And they give, they do things, they travel to help out. That’s throughout history, not just now.
“Maybe there’s nothing they can do in that moment – but at least they care.”
She took on personal challenges in Jordan on top of what she’d ‘normally’ face.
After 40 years as a plastic surgeon, this was her first time working away from theatre. But more than that, it followed the death of her 26-year-old son, Jock, whose picture sits on a table under her studio window.
“He should be grieving me,” she says as she looks over at him. “I don’t think I’ll ever stop grieving – but you can function. If it’s your field of work, you just do it.
“Then you go home and you’re alone again and you’re grieving again. But in the moment that you’re busy in the work, it takes you out of the grieving process... not totally, but somewhat.
“We’ll see if I go back. My shoulder dislocated in Jordan, and I’m getting older. I’m busy on physio right now, so it’s a bit up in the air.
“But I‘d like to. Course I would.”
IRISH PEOPLE, FOR THE MOST PART, DON’T STICK THEIR HEADS IN THE SAND... THEY CARE