A doctor from Newfoundland and Labrador is detailing the heartbreak, horror, and destruction facing people living in Gaza.
Dr. Elise Thorburn is an emergency physician who left for Gaza City last month as a volunteer and organization called Glia.
Dr. Elise Thorburn (submitted)
Thorburn says she was not allowed to bring any medical supplies with her, not even her stethoscope.
She is working at a hospital, though there is no physical building as it has been destroyed in the conflict, instead doctors have set up a series of tents. She describes medical supplies as being “radically limited.”
UNICEF medical tent in Gaza City (submitted)
Thorburn says people are dying from injuries that “would be totally survivable in any other context anywhere in the world.”
She cites a young man who was about 18 years old as an example. She says he arrived in the ER a few days ago with a gunshot wound to his leg and a shrapnel injury to his back.
Thorburn says the man’s heart stopped. They performed CPR on a dirt floor and brought him back, and took him into the operating room to fix the artery in his leg.
“In any other context, that would be a damaging, but very likely a survivable incident. But because of the lack of supplies, the lack of any kind of medication to treat any other injuries with any of the ways his body was responding to so much loss of blood, he ended up not surviving – he didn’t live through the night.”
