One Surgeon's Story - Banda Aceh
BY ROB ATKINSON

my normal commitments apart from quickly buying a camera. I was then obliged to walk out of my private practice with patients in the waiting room. Although I have been active in operations before, I have never had such a precipitous activation and I felt enormously guilty leaving these patients, many of whose problems I tried to solve on the phone and redirect them as I crossed town.

Secretly, deep down I felt a bit like the bus driver who won cross lotto and was driving past all the passengers. There was a guilty sense of freedom. I managed to get home, unpack all my military gear, pack again with civilian attire, and head for the airport. A phone call from Brendon Kearney was, ‘Where are you?’ and my reply was, ‘I’m coming through the gate now.’ I basically walked on board the plane in my normal coat and tie, the only one I believe who was wearing a tie.

We arrived in Sydney and were ensconced in the Novatel Hotel that evening, and for the next two days, in the business boardroom with numerous whiteboards, making hundreds of phone calls, we configured our team with medical and living resources. We initially attempted to find out the type of casualties and potential numbers, and that data seemed to be very limited. Other teams had also been activated and left on Wednesday night for Jakarta, as well as others to Sri Lanka and the Maldives. The latter two teams returned within days. The first team from New South Wales with my friend Col Peter Sharwood on board, as well as Annette Holian who had experience from the previous tsunami in New Guinea, went to Jakarta where they had great difficulty getting their equipment and an aircraft to get to Medan or Banda Aceh.

We were very busy configuring our equipment given that some was sent to the Maldives, Sri Lanka and Singapore and came back in a very roundabout route. We are not sure how Qantas managed to achieve this but they were kindly offering free passage for those involved in the tsunami relief operations. In Sydney we managed to gain a small presentation with two of the staff at the Novotel and Darling Harbour who actually came from Sumatra and were able to give us a fairly good heads-up on cultural sensitivity. We had a change of leadership but essentially gained information regarding the tsunami from television, which showed this huge wave coming into Thailand. This revealed people being tumbled with debris and thus our conclusion was that we would see contaminated lacerations, degloving and fractures, which subsequently proved to be the case.

It was disappointing we didn’t get information from Banda Aceh, and in fact I had noted from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade that 28 Australians had been admitted to hospital around the region.

In the microcosm this would have been a picture of the injury pattern. DEFAT replied that due to confidentiality we could not access this data although we only wanted the identified pathology. They then indicated that all the patients had left hospital, which was true in the region in which they had initially been hospitalised, but they came back to Australian for their surgical debridement and subsequent management.

Having configured the team with good equipment and for example, we planned external fixaturs using dental cement. Qantas would not allow the monomer to fly in the aircraft and another good friend, Lt Col Andrew Ellis, Orthopaedic Surgeon from Royal North Shore, came up with the idea of using resin normally...

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One Surgeon's Story
- Bandah Aceh

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