When the bombs exploded near the finish line at the Boston Marathon, doctors in the medical tent didn't know what to do: Should they run from danger? Should they go outside to help the injured? Should they stay with their patients in the tent?
According to a stirring piece by Sushrut Jangi in The New England Journal of Medicine, a family physician, Pierre Rouzier,
texted his wife what might be a good-bye message: There's a bomb at the finish line and we have to help. “I didn't want to die,” he said, “but there were people out there.”
One woman "held his arm and said, "I'm going to die right here, and no one is going to know who I am.' Rouzier held her hand and told her, 'You're not going to die.'"
Much of the piece is a mini-profile of Rouzier, who said he didn't look anyone in the eye and felt his "actions had been mechanical rather than compassionate." This from a doctor who had spent his whole life doing triage. But, as Jangi writes, "he had no idea how to triage himself."
Many of the doctors, Jangi reports, did nothing. They had no blood, no surgeons. They had never seen such trauma.
Jangi is at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, and is an editorial fellow at The New England Journal. His piece is difficult to read, but it's important.
[Thanks to Carey Goldberg at Commonhealth for calling my attention to this.]
-Paul Raeburn
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