MUZAFFARABAD, 27 October 2005 — US Army MASH surgeons swung into action yesterday, operating on a 20-year-old woman with a broken leg as more patients started trickling into the field hospital in Pakistan’s devastated city of Muzaffarabad.
“Absolutely, we welcome more patients. We’re looking forward to performing surgery,” said Victor Lebedovych, 62, a surgeon from Lapeer, Michigan. “Putting up a hospital is our work, but after that we don’t want to stand around idle.”
The 212th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, based near Ramstein, Germany, arrived Monday with more than 130 staff, equipment and blood after a series of setbacks, including delays caused by a shortage of aircraft and breakdowns on the winding, narrow roads of the northern Pakistan.
Yesterday, a contingent of the US Navy Construction Battalion, based in Okinawa, Japan, arrived with 74 military staff to help clear mountain roads and rebuild Muzaffarabad.
Officials said that about 100 injured or homeless villagers were arriving daily into the city from the surrounding mountains, which echoed with the sound of road clearers’ explosions.
MASH is the fifth mobile medical unit to set up in the ravaged city, and doctors feared they might have arrived too late to perform major operations — more than two weeks after the Oct. 8 quake that killed over 54,000 people.
But local army officials were clearly impressed with the unit as they toured it in the scorching Himalayan sun.
“This is very good indeed. MASH will be able to provide invaluable help to cover all kinds of casualties and take the load off other hospitals,” said Col. Saqib Khan, a surgeon in Pakistan’s Army Medical Corps.
A day after arriving, US Army doctors treated their first patients: a girl and boy whose homes were destroyed in the magnitude 7.6 quake.
The children, who had leg injuries, were given painkillers and antibiotics, and told to return in a few days.
By yesterday afternoon, the unit had treated 35 patients arriving steadily on foot or by ambulance.
The surgeons performed their first surgery late Tuesday — on a pregnant woman who’d had a miscarriage — after treating 19 other patients, mostly for breathing problems and other minor ailments.
The MASH unit has 21 female doctors and nurses to treat female patients in this Muslim country, where women are not allowed to reveal their bodies to men.
After her surgery, Shamim Shah, age 20, spent the night in the MASH hospital at a government complex on the outskirts of city. She said she was glad to be treated by American doctors.
“God willing, I will be well,” Shamim said in the 12-bed casualty unit, with her husband, Ulfat Shah, and an aunt standing by her bed.
The couple had walked four days from the town of Wadi Neelum, which was destroyed in the quake. They went straight to the MASH hospital after local police told them American doctors had arrived.
