(Un) Reality

(Un) Reality

    Let me start out right away by saying that this particular post is not for everyone.  It is graphic, it is gross, it is unbelievable, and it is true.  So just as with one of those movie ratings before a film begins, the ones we all tend to ignore, please think twice before reading on (much of this will be medical speak as taken from a reporter's notes but it is still not easy reading...I'll preview you in the next paragraph and advise that the reportage of the atrocities will only grow more graphic).  What brought all of this about was the fact that my brother and I were having lunch in the cafeteria housed in the hospital building.  We were facing the mountains, watching the passing storm through large tinted windows, talking about the much needed rain and me pointing out a bit of geological reference for my out-of-state brother.  Then a life-flight chopper arrived, then another.  Perhaps an accident on the highway or something.  We kept munching on our tofu salads.  The choppers began to refuel after the hospital staff took away the people in the incoming stretchers, the storm moved on, the sun emerged, and our thoughts drifted away to what flavors of ice cream they were serving at the snack stand.  It was all so unreal, my mother upstairs and perfectly cared for in her air-conditioned room, her serum levels of everything from glucose to sodium being tracked and recorded, the nurses and doctors almost as precise as the beeping machines that monitored her drip lines.  Something didn't match, the life-flight choppers so clean and maintained, the hospital floors so shiny and mopped almost hourly.  My brother and I shifted our conversation to other countries and other places with less than a thousandth of the staff or the supplies of this hospital (one of many such hospitals in our valley)...for as was and is happening in Syria, hospitals were being targeted and bombed, .

    In a story written by Ben Taub in The New Yorker, the unreality of snipers and such targeting of medical personnel and wounded people seemed unreal in today's world, despite the "all's fair in love and war" saying.  Here's a portion of his story to give you a bit of background: In the past five years, the Syrian government has assassinated, bombed, and tortured to death almost seven hundred medical personnel, according to Physicians for Human Rights, an organization that documents attacks on medical care in war zones. (Non-state actors, including ISIS, have killed twenty-seven.)  Recent headlines announced the death of the last pediatrician in Aleppo, the last cardiologist in Hama.  A United Nations commission concluded that “government forces deliberately target medical personnel to gain military advantage,” denying treatment to wounded fighters and civilians “as a matter of policy.”...Thousands of physicians once worked in Aleppo, formerly Syria’s most populous city, but the assault has resulted in an exodus of ninety-five per cent of them to neighboring countries and to Europe.  Across Syria, millions of civilians have no access to care for chronic illnesses, and the health ministry routinely prevents U.N. convoys from delivering medicines and surgical supplies to besieged areas.  In meetings, the U.N. Security Council “strongly condemns” such violations of international humanitarian law.  In practice, however, four of its five permanent members support coalitions that attack hospitals in Syria, Yemen, and Sudan.  The conditions in Syria have led to a growing sense among medical workers in other conflict zones that they, too, may be targeted.  How can this be?  Wasn't helping the injured a non-political matter and thus off limits?  But it gets worse: In the first weeks of March, 2011, the start of the insurrection in Syria, the security forces of President Bashar al-Assad detained and tortured children who had drawn anti-regime slogans on a wall in the southern city of Dara’a.  Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets, and on March 22nd Assad’s forces stormed into the city hospital, kicked out the nonessential medical staff, and positioned snipers on the roof.  Early the next morning, the snipers fired at protesters.  A cardiologist named Ali al-Mahameed was shot in the head and the chest as he tried to reach the wounded.  Thousands of people attended his funeral, later that day, and they, too, were attacked with live ammunition.  For the next two years, the snipers remained stationed on the roof, “firing on sick and wounded persons attempting to approach the hospital entrance,” according to the U.N. commission...By the end of 2012, Syrian government forces had attacked medical outposts at least eighty-nine times, in eight provinces.  Near Damascus, they raided and burned to the ground a clinic and three hospitals, killing all the patients and staff in one of them.  In Homs, they shelled a field hospital twenty times in two days.  In Aleppo, military aircraft fired rockets at a children’s hospital, causing it to shut down.  Ground forces spent four days shelling a mental hospital.

    Much of this has been part of the typical style of primitive war, that of sending a bomb to destroy something and then sending in another bomb at the exact same spot twenty minutes later to destroy the rescuers.  But up until now, I had no vision of the extent of the usage of antiquated bombs and the damage that they brought.  From the surgeon's view on the ground there: For almost a year, Syrian government helicopters had been lobbing barrels filled with shrapnel and TNT onto markets, apartment blocks, schools, and hospitals.  Welded tail fins guide the barrels to land on top of an impact fuse.  The methods of targeting are so rudimentary and indiscriminate that, in Aleppo, many residents have moved closer to the front lines, risking sniper fire and shelling, because the helicopters don’t drop barrels near government troops...When a large bomb explodes, it destroys bodies in consecutive waves.  The first is the blast wave, which spreads air particles at supersonic speeds.  This can inflict internal damage on the organs, because, Nott (the surgeon) said, “the air-tissue interface will bleed.  So your lungs start to bleed inside.  You can’t breathe.  You can’t hear anything, because your eardrums are all blown out.”  A fraction of a second later comes the blast wind, a negative pressure that catapults people into the air and slams them into whatever walls or objects are around.  “The blast wind is so strong that in the wrong place it will actually blow off your leg,” Nott said.  He showed me a photograph of a man on the operating table, whose left leg was charred mush and mostly missing below the knee.  “It’ll strip everything off your leg.  And that’s why people have such terrible injuries.  It’s the blast wind that does that, followed by fragmentation injuries,” from bits of metal shrapnel that rip through flesh and bone, and the flame front, which burns people to death.  Barrel bombs blow up entire buildings, filling the air with concrete dust; many people who survive the initial explosion die of suffocation minutes later.  Every day, patients arrived at the hospital so mangled and coated in debris that “you wouldn’t know whether you were looking at the front or the back, whether they were alive or dead,” he said.  “Every time you touched somebody, the dust would go into your face and down into your lungs, and you’d be coughing and spluttering away as you were trying to assess whether this patient was alive.”  It gets even worse.

   

    “Every day, we’d receive about twelve to fifteen sniper wounds,” Nott told me.  Many of the victims were children, and the patients coming in from the crossing point arrived with eerily consistent injuries.  “It was very strange,” Nott said.  “You’d know that, at the start of the day, if you got a patient shot in the right arm, you’d have six or seven more shot in the right arm.  And if somebody got shot in the abdomen you’d have six or seven shot in the abdomen.”  Nott suspected that snipers were targeting specific areas of the body, as part of a sadistic game.  He consulted with Aziz, (a pseudonym for one of the surgeons, now targeted by Assad's forces) who claimed that the gunmen were making bets over whom they could hit, and where. Aziz told me, “We used to sometimes listen to the walkie-talkies of the regime.  And they used to listen to us.”  One day, he said, “we heard a man say, ‘I bet for a box of cigarettes...’ ”...Even pregnant women were targeted, the doctors suspected.  “This is a pregnant lady who’s just about to deliver,” Nott explained, in London, as he clicked through a series of ghastly photographs on his laptop. “She was forty weeks pregnant and was about to have a breech delivery, and was shot in the uterus.”  A Syrian physician filmed Nott performing an emergency Cesarean section.  Only the mother lived; an X-ray of the fetus showed a bullet lodged in its skull.

     Thinking back to my mother being cared for in this pristine hospital, aided by this modern well-equipped staff and digital medical files, this safety behind enormous blue picture windows, one had to wonder how people could be so callous with life, to target not only innocent people just trying to get something to eat, but also those trying to simply help pull others to safety or trying to operate quickly enough to save a life.  Children, pregnant women, the elderly...it seemed unreal that life to some can become little more than target practice over a pack of cigarettes.  Again I had to ask, where did the bullets and weapons come from?  Where did the hatred come from?  When did the empathy give way to apathy?  It is and remains a part of humanity I am unable to comprehend, even as I realize that I am part of this species...do these traits, these genes, somehow lurk inside each of us?  And if so, what brings them out or holds them back?  Can those of us who will never witness or never read about such true atrocities truly separate them from the fictitious Hollywood movie or game or novel that shows us such horrors?  Is it all fake, all unreal?  Maybe in our air-conditioned theatre or our den with Beats headphones.  But after reading Ben Taub's article, it might just be time for a gut check, a time to separate what we think we enjoy and imagine from what is in reality, a horror show happening daily...and it might be a time to count our blessings.