Originally Posted by
aaerdan
The rescuers would be in need of counselling/therapy when this is over....
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Doctor feels 'knife though heart' as children lose limbs
BEIJING: Using a firefighter's axe, scissors and a kitchen knife, Li Yinxian amputated the legs of a young boy in a desperate bid to free him from the rubble of his school, only to watch him slowly die.
"When I told the boy I was going to cut off his legs he just said 'Go ahead, please save me, I don't need them'," Li Yinxian, a doctor aiding rescue efforts after China's devastating earthquake, told the Beijing News.
"The words were like a knife through my heart," he said in a heart-rending report that contrasts sharply with the images of miracle rescues broadcast on state-controlled television.
Li, the deputy head of a nearby hospital in southwestern China's Beichuan county, saved the life of one schoolgirl on Thursday by amputating her legs but failed to save two of her schoolmates.
No general anaesthetic was used in the emergency procedures and a lack of medical equipment forced Li and other doctors to use any tools that came to hand for the emergency surgery.
Progress was slow because of the primitive conditions and especially the cramped spaces in which doctors were forced to operate, said Li.
"There was a boy and a girl who were trapped together, one on my left and one my right," he said. "The boy was in worse shape with his head trapped and blood everywhere so I worked on him first."
The boy died under the knife as a colleague of Li's worked on the girl. "During the surgery, the girl was quietly weeping, saying 'Uncle I am thirsty. Uncle, save me'."
She was in great pain, according to Li, but held on during the surgery, only to die once she had been pulled out safely.
Li said amputating limbs was a last resort, but the only hope of saving some of the children.
"I was against it at first but the kids couldn't last any longer. Cutting off a limb to safe a life was all we could do," he said.
Most painful for Li was a girl who was beyond his reach, trapped further inside the rubble under a collapsed doorway.
As Li worked on the children nearest to him, he could hear her plaintive voice.
"She was saying 'Uncle, uncle save me. All you need to do is push the door away and I will be able to get out on my own'," Li was quoted as saying in the Beijing News. "But she was trapped too deep and there was no way I could get to her. Slowly the voice faded away." - AFP