Volunteers in Turkey build makeshift hospitals in the earthquake zone

Antakya, Turkey – An ambulance pulled up on Friday morning towards the red tent cluster now used as the main hospital in the devastated city of Antakya. He was fetching a woman who he pulled from the rubble of her home after nearly 100 hours under the rubble.

Although one of her legs was broken and she was hit in the head by a falling concrete block, she was conscious and able to speak. She wanted to know where her two children were. But they have not yet been found.

For the doctors in the field hospital, hastily constructed in a parking lot, miracles grew almost routine, but there were never enough of them. As the days go by and more dead than living are taken from the rubble, they are getting rarer and scarcer.

At the field hospital, 200 patients are no longer arriving every hour, as they did on Mondays and Tuesdays.

However, people continued to be pulled from the rubble, requiring treatment of shattered limbs, dehydration, and exposure. It often meant amputation. For many pregnant women, that meant going into premature, traumatic labor.

“If I told you what I went through, what I saw in the last five days, maybe the movies wouldn’t seem so dramatic,” said Khalil Kabbaday, 25, a maternity nurse. , red tent – who dropped everything to come from Izmir, Turkey, to volunteer.

Considering the scale of the destruction, the fact that Antakya has established a semi-functional medical system is remarkable. Monday’s earthquake destroyed hospitals as well as homes, leaving emergency responders in 10 provinces unable to initially provide proper care to people crushed by collapsed buildings.

Since then, however, a new, makeshift healthcare system has been built amid the devastation by volunteers from all over Turkey and the world. While the seriously injured were sent to undamaged hospitals in other provinces for treatment, field hospitals have sprung up in the heart of the quake zone to stabilize newly rescued people, treat more minor injuries and manage illnesses that flared up in the aftermath of the disaster. Even pets rescued from the rubble were receiving voluntary medical care at a makeshift animal hospital in Antakya.

Deadly earthquake in Turkey and Syria An earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale on February 6, with its epicenter in Gaziantep, Turkey, has become one of the deadliest natural disasters of this century.

“Our work has just begun,” said Dr. Ferit Kilic, 38, an emergency room doctor at a state hospital in Istanbul who volunteered to help on Monday. “As health teams, we’ve been here for five days with no shower and no toilet. But that’s not important. Every life we ​​save is important to us.”

A medical student traveled 375 miles to reach the disaster area as soon as he heard about the earthquake. Mr. Kilic flew in from Istanbul on a plane full of volunteer doctors and nurses. A veterinarian and her friend came from Ankara intending to help humans, but they ended up treating pets. An Indian maxillofacial surgeon and the rest of his army medical team have set out for Turkey, one of several medical groups from around the world who will come to help.

“I just heard the news and I thought, I can’t stay home,” said Mumtaz Buyukuken, 27, a medical intern from the Turkish city of Konya. He said he had spent the days since the earthquake helping set up a makeshift hospital at a school in the coastal city of Iskenderun, where one of two hospitals had stopped working.

The emergency affected the lives of many medical professionals in the area as well, often preventing them from helping. In Pazardzhik, near the epicenter, only five or six of the 13 ambulance crew – one of only two in the town – were able to work after Monday, said an ambulance worker who lost several relatives.

The rest had to bury family members or look for new places to live.

“I couldn’t go back to work,” said Emre Tocgozlu, an ambulance worker. “I only deal with my family since the earthquake.”

All week long, the soundtrack was in Antakya and other cities hard hit by the noise of the crisis. Helicopters carrying aid have become so familiar that people can hardly look at them. When electricity is not available, dimming generators power search and rescue teams’ floodlights. Ambulance sirens blare over and over, raging against traffic so impenetrable that it always takes a minute for drivers to let them pass.

More often than not, however, silence falls across the street. Search and rescue teams call everyone to silence, cars stop their engines while searchers listen for sounds in the rubble.

The siren is a reminder that there are still heart-beating people out there under the concrete. But increasingly, there are no sounds, and the searchers only find corpses.

As the chaos and trauma subside from the first days after a disaster, it often falls to doctors not only to treat patients’ wounds but to try to reunite them with their estranged families, assuming they are alive: separated parents, children of siblings, pet owners, And few are able to find each other on their own because electricity and mobile phone service are still scarce.

Now, new waves of patients are creeping in: people from rural villages, stranded at the end of snow-covered or damaged roads, who haven’t been able to get to help yet; people who were too busy looking for buried relatives or finding shelter to seek treatment for their minor wounds; Wounded as they return to their precarious homes to retrieve their belongings. Many people, who were suddenly homeless on Monday, have gone all week without medication for chronic diseases such as asthma, diabetes and high blood pressure.

Doctors in Hatay province, where Antakya is the largest city, said they are also concerned about the health effects of sleeping for days in the cold, where many people displaced by the quake have been injured.

Hundreds of thousands of people were living in crowded tents without access to toilets, showers, soap, or much nutritious food, and conditions were ripe for the spread of infectious disease. People would burn whatever they could find to keep warm in the freezing temperatures, and would cough continuously from the pungent smoke. The lack of toilets, not even potty potties, doctors said, meant that many people were drinking less than they should to avoid having to defecate in the open, which led to dehydration.

In order to manage daily ailments and treat minor injuries, many of the newly homeless have been turning to small makeshift clinics like the one run by the Turkish Communist Party on the western side of Antakya. Under a blanket of blue canvas stretched near the ruins of a gas station, volunteers handed out donated medicine, while doctors cared for 31-year-old Syrian baklava maker Basel Al-Noun, who has spent the past four days hauling victims out of collapsed apartments. He was too busy getting help for his bloody left hand, which he couldn’t move much.

Aslhan Çakaloglu, 45, one of the doctors, came to Antakya from the capital, Ankara. She said she and her team were initially overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster, a problem for which the only solution was to get to work and keep working.

“To know that there are many people under the buildings that you cannot reach and treat, it is very bad,” said Dr. Cacaloglu. “But now we are organizing. It means something we can do in our jobs.”

Shafak Timur contributed reporting from Gaziantep, Turkey.

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