Fingers torn off, eyeballs gouged out, genitals damaged. A doctor who works at the Hôtel-Dieu de France in Beirut has seen first-hand the physical damage caused by pager explosions in Lebanon. She tells The Press how the hospital emergency room handled the “traumatic” experience on Tuesday. She prefers not to use her name because she has not been authorized to speak publicly.
You were in the emergency room when the first injured people arrived. Tell us about it.
The series of explosions had started around 3:30 p.m. The media was talking about it. The emergency room doctor told us it had just happened. Around 4 p.m., they called us to sound the code orange and evacuate all the patients from the emergency room, in order to make room for the victims who were starting to arrive.
Have you taken in a lot of injured people?
At first, there was a lot of turnover, it was going fast. With the night, it calmed down a bit. We must have received about 80 patients. Fewer than at the American University of Beirut Medical Center. The surgical staff was a bit overwhelmed, because there were mostly surgical cases and few medical cases, but they managed well.
How did you do it?
Patients were transferred either to the operating rooms, to the intensive care unit, or to the ward to be treated the next day, depending on their condition. We didn’t know how serious the situation was going to be, but we expected the worst and acted quickly. If I remember correctly, about ten operations were going on at the same time.
For what kinds of injuries?
No life-threatening risk as such. But most of the patients, maybe 90%, had pretty much the same reasons: they were hit in both hands or in the eyes. Several had finger amputations and total enucleation of the eyes, which is the removal of the entire eyeball. This was pretty major, because there was a lot of debris in the globes from the explosions, with very significant damage.
Hands and eyes…
Yes. Several said they had received a call just before. Presumably they were holding their devices with both hands and looking at them at the time of the explosion.
PHOTO MOHAMED AZAKIR, REUTERS
“Most of the patients, perhaps 90%, had roughly the same reasons: they were affected in both hands or in the eyes,” explains a doctor at the Hôtel-Dieu de France in Beirut.
We’ve heard of facial reconstruction. To what extent?
Mostly ocular, I would say. The majority of the victims were… Their eyes were… (silence)… Their eyes were practically blown out, with multiple facial injuries. Many will remain blind. If not in both eyes, at least in one eye.
Did you see any injuries elsewhere, such as to the lower body, because they might have had their device in their pocket?
There are people who had digestive hemorrhages and had to have emergency surgery. There are others who were affected in the genital area.
Were the people you treated the owners of the devices? Did you also treat collateral victims?
There were both. We had bystanders get hurt because they were standing next to them. No children, at least in my hospital. Very few women. The majority were men. Almost all of them were the owners of the pagers.
Have you ever seen so many serious cases at the same time?
Me, no. But in 2019, when there was the explosion at the port of Beirut, it was even more serious.
A word to describe this ordeal?
Traumatic…and not just for the injured.