By Peter Almond
It was one of the most complex military logistical and medical operations ever undertaken – and it saved the life of a young British soldier critically injured in Afghanistan.
It involved hundreds of doctors, air and ground crews of several nations, travelling many thousands of miles, revolutionary and experimental medical equipment, several planes and helicopters and communications between three continents and cost millions of pounds.
For months, details of the massive operation to save one man’s life have been shrouded in secreMcy. The injured soldier was not shot by the Taliban but was almost certainly wounded accidentally at his camp near Sangin in Helmand province in late July last year.
It is understood that Soldier X – he is not being identified at the request of his family – was not wearing body armour at the time. The Ministry of Defence has declined to offer any explanation.
The respected American journalist Michael Yon, himself a former US special forces soldier, reported on his blog that he heard the shot and saw a flurry of activity and a medical evacuation helicopter taking Soldier X away.
Then began a most incredible effort to save his life.
Soldier X had been shot in the abdomen and chest, losing his right lung and damaging his liver, according to the US military Stars And Stripes newspaper. Another American military report said his blood supply was replaced more than ten times, and that he was transfused with 75 units of blood and another 75 units of platelets.
He was alive – but only just. He needed specialist equipment to do what his lungs could not: provide oxygen to his blood and remove the carbon dioxide built up in its passage through his body. He needed an artificial lung and intensive care within hours. Such equipment was available at hospitals in Britain, nearly 4,000 miles away, but Soldier X would almost certainly die on the long flight.
He needed a portable, low-pressure artificial lung and the Americans offered to help. But the bureaucracy of moving from the British to the American military system meant that valuable time was being lost.
Contacted by a quick-thinking British doctor at Camp Bastion, Mr Yon sent an urgent email to a group of American civilian volunteers called Soldiers’ Angels near Ramstein Air Base in Germany, where most American casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan are initially sent.
The volunteers, founded by the great-niece of General George S. Patton, alerted the US Army’s nearby Landstuhl Regional Medical Center’s Acute Lung Rescue Team, which specialises in going straight to the aid of soldiers with severe lung problems.
And within an hour, the team was in touch with doctors at the nearby University of Regensberg who had access to a revolutionary portable artificial lung called a Novalung. The still experimental German-made machine takes over much of the job of circulating blood, filling it with oxygen and filtering out the carbon dioxide without the use of the mechanical pumps in the older Extra Corporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) machines, which have been known to cause damage to a patient by forcing the blood around the body.
Novalung is powered by the patient’s own heartbeat at a lower pressure, and has been used by the Landstuhl team several times, even though it has yet to be formally accepted into general use by either Germany or Britain.
It had never been used on a patient in transit, however. Soldier X would be the first to use it on his flight back to Germany.
Read the rest of the article at the U.K. Daily Mail.
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