‘I’ve seen too much to stay silent’
When compassionate David Nott, 60, was presented with a Pride Of Britain award last year, we were all in floods of tears. The war surgeon has taken unpaid leave for a couple of months each year to treat patients in some of the world’s most troubled spots, including Syria, Afghanistan, Bosnia and Gaza.
He’s operated through power cuts and threats of bombings. Even when terrorists stormed his makeshift operating theatre, armed with Kalashnikov rifles, David never stopped trying to save lives.
In 2010, he rescued a Haitian baby from the rubble of an earthquake and persuaded authorities to let the child come to London for life-saving surgery.
And it’s hard not to be moved when hearing him talk about Maram, an orphaned Syrian child he operated on last year, who he saw again in March.
‘I held her,’ he said at the time. ‘ We were staring, almost in amazement, at each other. She’s only seven months old, she can’t know anything, but there was an amazing connection between us.’
Although David is happily married to his wife, Elly, 33, and they have a young daughter, with another child on the way, the family have discussed adopting Maram to give her a loving, stable home.
David’s heroic efforts have not gone unnoticed, and the Queen recently awarded him an OBE. Despite suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, the surgeon still treats patients both at home and abroad, and feels it is part of his job to speak out about what is happening in the war-torn areas of the world he visits.
‘If I never said a single word, it would be like denying anything is going on. Awful things are going on. It’s time to make people realise what is happening.’