Battle on in Banda Aceh to save those who can be saved
Battle on in Banda Aceh to save those who can be saved
Laurence Boutreux, Agence France-Presse, Banda Aceh
When Australian surgeon Paul Shumack arrived at Banda Aceh's military hospital there were hundreds of dead bodies littering the corridors.
Most of the medical staff were either dead, had disappeared or were off looking for missing relatives.
Four days later and his team of surgeons is battling to save as many lives as they can, but with gangrene setting in, that job often involves amputation.
At the entrance to the operating theater of the military hospital, Nuraini lies on a camp bed.
The devastating tsunamis that crashed ashore here after a massive earthquake just off the Aceh coast on Dec. 26 claimed the lives of her husband, three sons, mother and two brothers.
When the waves entered her house, they tossed the 37-year-old around. "The debris of the roof made wounds on her face, arms and chest," her younger sister explains.
"A lot of people are suffering terribly infected wounds," Shumack says, explaining that debris embedded in body tissue was to blame.
He is one of a team of five Australian surgeons working around the clock at the hospital.
"We try to salvage people's arms and legs, but sometimes the only way to save their life is amputation," he says.
He has just cut into the knee of a woman whose leg is infected from the thigh down to her foot.
The hospital was in a hideous state when he arrived, he explains: "There were, around the corner, 500 bodies in black bags."
And although some international aid is getting through, the hospital is still woefully short of staff.
"The international community is certainly providing mainly doctors, but what is lacking in this hospital is nursing staff," he says.
Most of the hospital's regular staff have not been at work since the disaster, their fate unknown.
"When I came here, on December 28, there were only 15 employees left," says neurosurgeon Sahat Edison, from the south of Indonesia's Sumatra province -- the worst affected in the catastrophe that caused destruction around the Indian Ocean.
"They may have disappeared, or didn't came back to work because they are trying to find their relatives," says Edison, who is overseeing the running of the hospital.
Medical volunteers from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, China and Japan are working at the hospital, almost lending it an air of normality.
Fifty of the hospital's beds are reserved for military personnel while 200 others have been made available for civilians being fed a diet of noodles, cake and mineral water.
On a list of patients posted in a corridor are 25 cases of typhoid, but Edison says they are not a major cause of concern, despite fears that epidemics could claim as many lives as the tsunamis themselves.
"This is not because of the quake. Maybe it would have been the same under normal conditions," he explains.
"Epidemics are not yet a problem. Most people suffer severe infections because of their wounds."
The main priority for the hospital, he adds, is to find bed space. With so many patients made homeless, few are keen to leave, even once they have started to recover.
In the center of the town, utterly devastated by the massive tsunamis, the General Zainul Abidin hospital has been flooded with a tide of mud.
Beds and furniture lie where they were dumped by the tide that swept through the wards, leaving a high-water-mark halfway up the wall.
Surgical masks covering their faces, soldiers get to work cleaning up the mess.