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Doctors with orders — for Iraq

Jul-26-2005 » Filed Under: TF Freedom

The following article highlights the activities of Army medical staff stationed in Mosul.

Link to Full Article
By Michael Moran, MSNBC

It was 3 a.m. when Dr. Tamarin McCartin’s pager went off. Three severely injured children, the survivors of an Iraqi family ripped apart by mortar fire the prior evening, had been driven around the dangerous, post-curfew Iraqi night by their teen-aged brother for more than seven hours in search of urgent medical help. Eventually, having been turned away from several facilities and the Syrian border, the boy convinced an American unit to break Army regulations and arrange helicopter transport to the U.S. Army’s 228th Combat Support Hospital in Mosul for his dying siblings.

“The three children that were here were a 14-year-old girl, a 12-year-old boy and a 7- or 8-year-old boy,” says McCartin. “I took care of the girl because at the time I was the only female physician in our [hospital].”

The girl was awake but strangely quiet, perhaps because she had seen her father and a brother blown to pieces earlier that night, McCartin says. Metal shards studded the back of her legs, back and buttocks, and one large piece lodged dangerously close to her bowel. She also had a broken back. After hours of surgery, the girl was stabilized. The two boys, injured even more extensively, also survived surgery, and within a few days all three had been transferred to an Iraqi children’s hospital in Mosul.

“As far as I know, they all lived,” McCartin says. But, like so many things in Iraq, there is no way to be sure.

An obstetric gynecologist from Honolulu, this is hardly the life Tamarin McCartin had foreseen when she elected to go to medical school on an Army scholarship. She and her husband, another Army OB/GYN, practice at Tripler Army Medical Center on Oahu, a great pink wedding cake of a hospital with Pacific vistas that is one of the most sought after postings in the U.S. military.

“This is very unlike anything I do at my job at Tripler,” says the doctor, who deployed to Mosul in June and spoke with MSNBC.com via email.


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