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October 3, 2013 1:40 am  #1


Trauma Surgeons - Recovery after War

I just watched a great documentary that other Sherlockians/Watsonians might be interested in:

Major Marc Dauphin was a super-confident, can-do medico fixing shattered bodies and trying to save lives as he ploughed through relentless shifts at one of the busiest military hospitals in the world – the Role Three, at Kandahar Air Base, Afghanistan.

He knew his job like the back of his hand. After all that’s where he kept an ever-changing, written list of his day’s patients, their diagnosis and treatment.

When reporter Sally Sara met Marc Dauphin in 2009 she found a wise-cracking ebullient and tireless pro doing the best he could under trying circumstances to deal with the endless parade of war victims being stretchered into the hospital, or brought into his operating theatre. Soldiers. Taliban insurgents. Women. Children.

Sally had arrived to film a 2 minute news story. What she saw over the next 24 hours has stayed with her ever since. Amid a maelstrom of woe and suffering, the deaths of two boys continue to haunt. One who died despite hours of life-saving work by medical staff who thought he’d turned the corner. Another, 10, blown apart by a mine.

‘He was so small that the body bag was folded in half like a suit pack and that’s how his life was carried out from this hospital’. SALLY SARA

When Sally asked Doctor Dauphin how he dealt with such carnage, emotion welled and candour emerged.

‘It’s a war. Women and children always pay. That’s what’s worse. That’s all’ MAJOR MARC DAUPHIN, Trauma doctor

Looking back at that exchange now, Marc Dauphin may see some early signs that led to the state that so bedevilled him when he returned home. The doctor who’d mended so many was broken himself – stricken with debilitating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

How he descended into PTSD, grappled with it and began to rebuild his life is the subject of the first of two programs from Sally Sara on the rising tide of this illness among returning veterans.

‘I could see the stare in his eyes and I now understood this 10,000 miles stare that you see in books from the soldier from World War I or German soldiers on the Russian front. I said, oh road to recovery won’t be as easy as I thought it would.’ CHRISTINE DAUPHIN, Marc's wife.

See it at http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2013/s3860093.htm

Last edited by The Doctor (October 3, 2013 1:41 am)

 

January 14, 2014 10:19 am  #2


Re: Trauma Surgeons - Recovery after War

Thanks for posting that. An amazing documentary. I've enjoyed Dauphin's book and it was intresting to watch that.

 

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