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Ibn Sina — where saving lives is an everyday event

Baghdad, Iraq — March 24, 2006

I’m sitting in Capt. Mark Heard’s office at the Ibn Sina 10th Combat Support Hospital inside the fortified International Zone and one of the soldiers who saved ABC News anchorman Bob Woodruff’s life just walked past in the hallway.

His name is Maj. Sam Mehta and he’s an emergency room physician here. He was wearing his Army physical training uniform, but when he’s in the emergency room he wears scrubs, soft leather clogs and sometimes a black fleece if it’s chilly.

He’s just one of so many incredible people I’ve met here at this hospital, where famous people like Woodruff, who was injured by a bomb in January, and the recently rescued hostages, Christian peacemakers who had been missing since November, were treated. It’s also where the not-so-famous U.S. troops — on duty here for a full year — are treated.

Lives are saved here every day in dramatic scenes that play out in the emergency and operating rooms. Boredom also happens, and with a balance of male and female soldiers working and living side by side, a family atmosphere prevails, with family-style squabbles and all.

The staff is forbidden from going out on missions or even from going that far from the hospital building. On medical evacuations to Germany and elsewhere, the nurses get to take the hour-long round trip to the airfield in Balad,k where they see their patients off. On their down time, the hospital staff can take advantage of the pool at a former Saddam palace down the street. Some of the nurses are already working on their summer tans before it gets too hot to lie out in the sun.

Some live right in the hospital building, others live across the street in a sandbagged trailer area they call “The Projects,” and still others live in a three-story building next to the hospital.

There is a good chow hall that serves up fresh stir-fry orders, and for those with no will power at all there is a sinful ice cream bar in the corner. They have phones, internet access and hundreds of books to choose from in hallway libraries. A rooftop overlooking the city — and the helipad where the casualties are brought in — is a favorite sanctuary for cigar smoking, guitar playing and relaxing.

But down on the lower floors, the doctors and nurses, Iraqi orderlies, maintenance workers, interpreters and a physician from the Ministry of Health earn a good day’s pay; the 10th CSH’s business — saving lives — never stops.

On a visit to the intensive care unit in early March, I watched Spc. Jacob Coppess, Staff Sgt. Burt Hensley and 1st Lt. Kelly Sipe tend to an Iraqi who was blinded and had part of his skull blown out when a bomb buried in a corpse exploded as he inspected it.

I watched them check on the man, a young policeman immobilized in complete sedation with a bandage on his head that said “DO NOT REMOVE” in block handwriting. The deodorant he had presumably applied that morning still looked white and powdery in his armpit, but his lanky body was limp, his lungs rising and falling with the help of a ventilator.

Next to him lay another equally messed-up Iraqi soldier, the victim of another sort of bomb.

In the same room across from the two Iraqis lay two American soldiers, both just out of surgery.

One of them was Pfc. Tyson Ivie, barely 20 years old, a red-headed soldier with the 101st Airborne Division I had met in the ER a few hours earlier. His X-ray showed a piece of shrapnel lodged dangerously close to his heart. Emergency room nurse 1st Lt. Kari Burroughs helped him place a cell phone call and he talked with his parents for about 10 minutes.

“I’m in the hospital, Dad. I’m doing good. It’s nothing big, I just got a little piece of shrapnel in me. They’re going to take care of it,” he told his father bravely, and then he reassured his mother, too.

Ivie listened as anesthesiologist Capt. Ron White told him in layman’s terms what they were going to do in surgery. Ivie said he had never been in a hospital before. White said something like, “You’re going to go to sleep and we’re going to get the shrapnel out and you’ll wake up later. Do you have anything you want to say before the surgery?”

Ivie looked up at the ceiling briefly and, looking back at the anesthesiologist, said stoically, “That I love my family.”

The surgery was a success and Ivie was evacuated from country shortly afterward.

It doesn’t always go that well, however. And, in the ER, a young soldier’s life can end before he even reaches the surgical table.

“Some are dying right in front of us and there’s nothing we can do about it,” said Lt. Col. John Groves, the head ER nurse. “The ones that talk to us usually say they just want to get back to their units. The guys who are getting ready to die say they are thirsty. You don’t have the luxury of grieving for them because you might have five or six more coming in right after them and you have to focus.”

He said it’s particularly hard when they have to amputate a soldier’s limb right in the emergency room. “There’s some finality to chopping someone’s leg off,” he said.

The thing that affects him most, however, is seeing boots. When a soldier comes in, the clothes come off. Perhaps, he said, it’s because he associates empty boots with the memorial service for a fallen soldier. “It’s the bloody boots or the burned boots that get me,” he said. I just think, someone’s foot was in there,” he said.

“I don’t think we have as much stress as they do in ICU,” Groves added. “We don’t get to know the patients as well. The last CSH advised us not to ask too much about them. It was good advice.”

On the third floor of the hospital, the operating room teams of nurses, surgeons, technicians and anesthesiologists stand by around the clock, their living quarters only steps away from the next life-saving procedure.

That’s life in a trauma hospital. At the Ibn Sina Hospital, it’s where the horrors of war land every day. It is a life that brings waves of excitement punctuated by hours of stillness.

“Trauma doesn’t change,” said Capt. Randi Schaefer, commander of Alpha Company in the 10th CSH, which took over operations at Ibn Sina in November. “It’s the sheer volume of it they see here. In the states there are not a lot of blast injuries, other than the occasional meth lab blowing up.”