“I'm not sure that we're going to be able to save her arm.”
So it’s um, it’s Monday the 19th of May and I’m just standing in theatre. We’ve just finished a case and I’m not going to lie. I am quite down now. We’ve just operated on the seven-year-old who’s had a blast injury that’s taken a huge chunk out of the side of her left cheek, back of her left shoulder and her left knee. And I’ve just been picking bits of shrapnel out of it and trying to get it as clean as we can. And then before her, I operated on her five-year-old sister, who has got a devastating injury to her left arm. She’s basically broken the humerus, which is the top bone in the arm. She’s lost 90% of the skin on her arm and she’s lost the outer aspect of her left hand. And at the moment, I’m not sure that we’re going to be able to save her arm. And then my colleagues next door, my orthopedic colleagues next door, have been operating on their mother, who has taken a blast injury to both her shoulders and is missing bone and skin on both her shoulders and they are not convinced that it’s a survivable injury. So we’re just waiting to find out how that’s going to turn out. So yeah, not a great day for us here. I’m not going to lie. And to make matters worse, we’ve just found out that we are now on the edge of the active fighting zone. So we can expect the bombing to get much, much louder. And we have lost four members of the team who have had to go back to their homes, their tents, because they’re in the active, they’re in the active fighting area and there’s an evacuation order on them. So four of them have left us to go back and evacuate their families. So we’re a skeletal staff. And yeah, it really, really bad times right now.