Like a war zone hospital, surgeons battle to save the injured and dying
SURGEONS fight for space to operate on gunshot victims in this remarkable picture revealing the bloody aftermath of the Paris attacks.
In scenes more akin to a warzone than a modern Western hospital, the sheer number of casualties clearly threatened to engulf the emergency room.
As the French health service approached meltdown on Friday, doctors battled against the odds in packed A&E departments across Paris.
The Hospital Saint Louis, which is only yards from the site of two cafe shootings, was the first to receive the badly wounded and quickly became almost overwhelmed.
Clinical director Dr Pourya Pashootan, who took this haunting photograph, admitted his staff ‘aren’t used to war scenes’ but hailed their resilience for continuing to work until the last patient was out of danger.
The image shows trauma specialists, consultants and nursing staff working on at least half a dozen patients as they battle to save lives.
Despite being covered up by sterile surgical scrubs, face masks and gloves, the medics’ concentration is apparent and intense.
Bloodied surgical instruments and dressings are visible in the foreground to the right of the picture as a surgeon works on the abdomen of an unconscious patient, a drip attached to their left wrist.
What appears to be blood stains the yellow hospital sheets.
To the left of the picture, another casualty remains wrapped in a silver thermal blanket, designed to try to stop the body going into shock and possibly wrapped round them by paramedics on the scene of the atrocity, while a doctor consults notes.
Everywhere, the staff go about their business under the harsh fluorescent hospital lighting, determined to save as many lives as possible.
Machines designed to monitor vital signs and provide liquids and painkillers intravenously are hooked up to patients. Racks of medical supplies on wheeled trolleys are visible in the background.
Another member of hospital staff, facing the camera, talks into a mobile phone, perhaps anticipating another wave of casualties.
Dr Pashootan told Le Point magazine: ‘Some of us were shocked. But everyone was really professional. Almost every team was there and all the medical and nursing staff present in Paris, despite not having been called, came to help us out of their own initiative.’
Such scenes were repeated across the city throughout Friday night and into Saturday as medics treated more than 300 casualties, some 100 or so critically injured from gunshots, shrapnel and blast wounds.
Yesterday at the larger Hospital Europeen Georges-Pompidou,
‘Shrapnel and blast wounds’
exhausted doctors and nurses gathered in their hundreds for a minute’s silence. In common with other vigils held across Paris at midday, they followed their silence with a round of defiant applause.
Among the patients paying their respects was Briton Mark Backwell, a 50-year-old rock music fan who was shot in the shoulder and wrist by gunmen at the Bataclan concert massacre. Looking relatively cheerful and no longer hooked up to a saline drip, Mr Backwell confirmed he was ‘doing well’ before returning to his hospital room.
As Parisians continued to come to terms with the shocking attacks, one heroic doctor who has worked in conflicts across the world spoke out to say: ‘Our health system is not ready for war.’ Dr Michel Bonnot, 62, compared the sight of corpses lying in a restaurant near his apartment to a scene from the Bosnian genocide as he recalled how he struggled to save two young women.
He blamed their deaths on a two-hour wait for experienced medics to arrive, as the ambulance service was engulfed by a state of paralysis because of the level of calls. ‘There were two girls, both shot,’ he said. ‘I saw one was lying on her side and she was speaking to somebody .
‘But we waited 20 minutes for rescue. The system didn’t work. I was alone. I lost the two wounded ladies – they were both under 30.’
He said the corpses strewn across the restaurant were ‘like something from Srebrenica’ and revealed that one man was presumed dead and left ‘lying face down in his blood’ after being shot in the head.
Paramedics threw a blanket over the stricken victim – until, nearly an hour later, they finally realised he was still breathing and took him to hospital.
Throughout the day, other stories of grief and suffering continued to emerge.
Aurelie de Peretti had come to Paris for a short holiday with a friend, a reward after a tough season of working in restaurants across the south of France.
But the 33-year-old’s trip came to a tragic end in the slaughter at the Bataclan, with her father expressing his bewilderment at the ‘tragic, unjust’ loss of his ‘shining girl’.
Sister Delphyne told Le Parisien newspaper she felt as if ‘someone has just amputated part of me’.
In another example of the terrorist’s sadistic disregard for human life, it was confirmed that Matthieu Giroud, 39, was among the murdered concert-goers at the Bataclan. The university lecturer’s wife is pregnant with their second child.
Another victim, Veronique Geoffroy de Bourgies, 54, was sitting with friends at a table outside La Belle Equipe on Rue Charonne when she was killed.
The mother of two children she had adopted from Madagascar had given up a career in journalism to focus on a charity she founded in 2004.