Word: ers
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...work, I sometimes look at people in the cars around me and wonder how many of them will end up on the beds of my hospital. I suppose one day I could be lying on one of them," he says, casting a glance at the ER's 12 iron-frame beds, covered in green plastic sheets that bear the bloodstains of countless patients who have gone before. "But I try not to think about that...
Many of the victims end up in the ER at Yarmouk Hospital, a beige concrete-and-brick building that looks more like an old warehouse than one of the country's best-regarded medical facilities. The Yarmouk district, on Baghdad's western flank, is ringed by the city's most violent neighborhoods, where insurgents tend to concentrate their attacks. Chief surgeon Jamil Bayati estimates that his tiny ER has taken in 10,000 people in the past 12 months and that more than 1,000 of them had "war wounds"--inflicted by insurgents, the U.S. military or Iraqi security forces...
...chronicle the devastating toll of the war on the daily lives of Iraqis, I spent part of last week in Bayati's ER. In the midst of my reporting, the story turned highly personal: two members of TIME's Baghdad staff became victims of a bomb blast and were rushed to Yarmouk Hospital. From that point on, I was intimately involved in nearly every decision the doctors and staff made as they struggled to keep my badly wounded colleagues alive. In the process, I experienced the anger, anxiety, frustration and sorrow that so many Iraqis must endure, often...
...explosion could be heard two miles away in the Yarmouk Hospital. Dr. Jalal Taha Emad told his crew to prepare to receive the wounded. "I heard the explosion in the distance," he says, "and I guessed that the ER was going to get very busy...
Prepping the ER is a simple business; there is not much to get ready. Apart from their stethoscopes, the only diagnostic tool available to the surgeons is a Soviet-era X-ray machine. Ultrasound equipment? No. CT scans? No. MRI? No. There are two thoracic surgeons for chest wounds, the most common kind of injury in bomb blasts, but the hospital lacks the equipment needed to perform actual surgery. Pleas for funds and tools have been ignored by an Iraqi health ministry that doctors say is underfunded, mismanaged and corrupt. "There are days when we don't even have enough...