Nott is in scrubs, ready to go straight into action if summoned (he is on call for trauma surgery today – “ stabbing injuries more often than not,” he says, sadly. We are talking today at St Mary’s where he has worked for 30 years. Nott is not unfamiliar with traumatic incidents – he recounts the time in Sarajevo when the ambulance he was travelling in was hit by snipers the operation in Syria when the object he removed from a woman’s leg turned out to be a detonator the moment when the nurse standing next to him in Yemen was felled by a bullet, or how several members of IS turned up at an operating theatre in Aleppo to monitor his surgery on one of their fighters. “It was an example of her ability to lift people’s spirits in times of need.” “The Queen’s sharp perception and kindness following my return from Aleppo will always stay with me,” he says now. Overcome by trauma, he found himself unable to speak when sitting next to her at lunch she suggested they spend 20 minutes feeding the corgis together instead. He has written a best-selling memoir, War Doctor, and moved people to tears on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2016, when he talked about meeting the Queen shortly after returning from Syria. He first went to the frontline in 1993, to Sarajevo with Medecins Sans Frontieres, and since then he has completed 32 missions in 21 different territories, receiving an OBE for his work. Nott has been going to war zones for 30 years. There is potential for it to go on for years, but I do think that the situation is changing for the better now and hopefully it will be brought to a conclusion much quicker with significant Western help.”
“I don’t think Putin will ever stop trying to get Ukraine. “I don’t know how this is going to pan out,” he says. “I was working in operating theatres in Zitoma which had no windows because they had all been blown out by cruise missiles, and I had 20 surgeons watching who were really happy to see me they had patients with terrible injuries somebody with his shoulder blown off, holes in peoples’ legs – injuries that they just didn’t know how to treat.” The course has so far been viewed by 1,000 surgeons in Ukraine and saved many lives.
Within 10 days of the war starting, he had put together a 12-hour Zoom course, with renowned neurosurgeon Henry Marsh, to teach surgeons essential techniques about how to deal with war injuries – fragmentation wounds, burns, mass casualty events. That surgeon, David Nott, knew exactly what he had to do.
In January of this year, the world’s most experienced war surgeon was working at St Mary’s, Paddington when he heard about Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border.
0 kommentar(er)
