Word: besim
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Thursday, April 29, of last year, a rainy day in Kosovo, should really have been the last of Besim Kadriu's life. That morning, in the Albanian sector of the town of Mitrovica, Serb paramilitaries torched the house the 21-year-old economics student shared with his pregnant wife Valbona. Watching the inferno from a distance, Kadriu was confident Valbona had escaped but was unsure where she had fled. He set off on foot for the village of Zaza, a few miles away, on a hunch she would be there with her two brothers. She wasn't, but a large...
...Besim Kadriu still keeps that photo in his wallet as a lucky charm, for while some people would opt for death rather than disfigurement, he considers himself a fortunate man. For one thing, a couple of centimeters farther back and that Serb bullet would have hit his brain. For another, he was reunited with Valbona and survived for three months in the care of relatives. He was still avoiding mirrors when the Kosovo Force peacekeepers arrived. But luckiest of all--and thanks to the efforts of an American doctor and a British military medic with a bag full of electronic...
...that the injury was far beyond his expertise to treat. "I've spent half my career in ERs in some of the most violent cities in America, seen all kinds of mangled human beings, but I've never come across anyone still alive carrying such a horrific injury as Besim." Local surgeons could do nothing. "I knew," says Clay, now back at the rural St. Helena Hospital in Deer Park, Calif., "that I had become his only hope...
Working with a Royal Army Medical Corps doctor who had an unsophisticated telemedicine link to the outside world--nothing more than a couple of standard digital cameras, a laptop, a satellite phone and an AOL account--Clay was able to put details of Besim's case and photos of his face on the Internet. The photos were copied and recopied in e-mail to surgeons across Britain who had responded to a British Medical Journal article appealing for help for Kosovo victims. The complexities of coordinating surgeons' timetables meant that plans for Kadriu's operation began to coalesce around Manchester...
Digital pictures of Besim Kadriu continue to flash across the Internet, keeping the band of doctors following his case informed of his progress. In California, Dan Clay has been especially thrilled to see the images. "I think I will always rate downloading those photos from Manchester as one of the greatest moments of my medical career," he says. "He looks beautiful...
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