Baghdad doctors struggle to care amid the chaos
Aggression, corruption and courage - a night in hospital offers a microcosm of life in city
Jonathan Steele in Baghdad
Friday July 30, 2004
The Guardian
Unconscious, a woman lies in the emergency ward as doctors struggle to save her life after she was knocked down by a hit-and-run driver. Her teenage son and daughter, her husband, and four other male relatives crowd round the hospital trolley.
When a young house doctor writes out a chit for more plastic bottles of saline solution or more disposable needles, one of the family rushes off to the hospital pharmacy to get the supplies. More often, the huddle of jostling people is a nuisance and - with the danger of grief that can suddenly turn to rage - a threat.
An evening in the Yarmuk hospital in western Baghdad is like a microcosm of Iraq's tense, no-holds-barred society; aggression, corruption, shortages and courageous efforts by a few people to improvise solutions.
It is also a window on the random violence which faces the capital's residents from bombs, street gangs and kidnappers.
In one bed lies a young man shot in the back in a quarrel between two families. Two police officers sit on another bed. One is bleeding from the mouth, the other has gashes on his forehead. They were attacked while arresting a street gang.
Three uniformed members of Iraq's National Guard run in with a captain bandaged above his left eye. Someone hit him on the head, apparently without provocation. The doctors redress the wound. "At least they're getting out now and doing something," says Dr Adham Sadoun Hamid, with no great sympathy for the guardsmen.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1272227,00.html
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