Egypt protests: the Tahrir Square medic

Doctors came under attack while still treating injured protesters Dina Omar is a 30-year-old Egyptian cardiologist living in Beirut; when news broke of Egypt’s anti-Mubarak uprising last month she flew back to Cairo and has been working at a frontline medical station in Tahrir Square since. I found out about the 25 January protests the day after they happened while surfing the internet, and I knew straight away that I needed to return – not just to check on my family, but also to witness something momentous that was happening to my country. I booked a flight and was due to travel on the Friday, but it was then that violence flared up across the country and the plane wouldn’t take off. We all sat in the airport terminal watching these horrific images from Cairo on the television, and it was terrifying – I couldn’t get any sleep. On Saturday the plane finally made it and as we touched down in Cairo I couldn’t have been happier. My family are originally from Heliopolis but now they live in New Cairo, and as I reached the neighbourhood all that happiness quickly drained away. Security had disappeared; our street is full of half-built villas with no protection, and my brother and the doorman had to stand through the night defending our home from looters. On Sunday I persuaded my family that we should all donate blood to help those injured in Friday’s fighting. While me and my sister were waiting in line I suggested to her that we go and take a look first-hand at what was happening in Tahrir. Soon after we arrived a young boy, probably about 13 years old, came up to me and asked whether I was a doctor. When I said yes, he told me his brother had been killed on Friday. He said it with no grief or tears – he was calm and polite, as if he just needed to inform someone. I asked him if he knew of any medical centre in the square that I could offer supplies to. He took me to a nearby mosque where the medics told me they were in need of a cardiologist. That was it for me. I drove my sister home and told the family I was going to volunteer. My mother begged me not to because of the danger, and my brother physically stood in front of my car to block me from leaving. But I appealed to my father’s conscience and finally he let me go. I got back to the square by mid-afternoon and worked through the night. The atmosphere was amazing; all these people thrown together and maintaining such solidarity. By Wednesday it seemed as if the worst was over and I began packing up my medical supplies. And that’s when it all got ugly. Suddenly there was a flood of people pouring into the mosque with deep scalp wounds and we were completely overwhelmed. Everybody joined in; even my sister who works in HR and hates blood was doing stitches. Soon other doctors arrived and I realised we had to get out in the field. People said we were crazy but three of us ended up heading out into the square and setting up a medical station up past the museum, where the fighting was most fierce. Conditions were so hard; it was dark, there were rocks and Molotov cocktails being thrown towards us, and at any one time we had more than 30 people desperate for treatment. At one point a bus of baltagiyya (thugs) drove right up to us and we had to flee and scatter, each carrying our patients. But from a medical point of view we did amazingly; even in the middle of a war zone we managed to keep most of the needles sterile, and when we couldn’t sterilise them we didn’t use them – it is better to bathe and clean a wound and leave it unstitched than it is for them to contract Aids or hepatitis. I treated over 200 patients that night, two of whom died in my lap. One 23-year-old was brought to me seemingly unconscious, with his head wrapped in bandages; we tried CPR for several minutes but it was clear we were too late. It was only when someone else ran up to us with a towel wrapped around a complete human brain that I realised what had happened – we turned the patient over and saw that the whole back of his head was missing. And of course there was no time to shed a tear. ‘ Yalla (let’s go),’ I said, ‘next patient.’ The last couple of days have been quieter. An army general has tried to persuade us to move the station, but we’ve refused because it’s our responsibility to remain here as long as these people need us, and to keep alive the memory of those that died – you can see some of their shirts hanging up by the railings. People ask me why I’m here, and there’s only one answer. I’m not here as a protester, I’m not here as a doctor, I’m just here as an Egyptian. We all are. Dina Omar was speaking to Jack Shenker Egypt Middle East Protest Jack Shenker guardian.co.uk

Posted by on February 6, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry