On a lower shelf were three rubber breathing pumps and a broken pediatric one. “Maybe it’s enough,” he said, shrugging. “But what if we have a mass casualty?”
Behind Curtain No. 3, he examined a man with chronic diabetes and a gangrened foot.
“We’ll give him IV fluid and antibiotics,” Amer said, then corrected himself. “Only today we don’t have broad-spectrum antibiotics — just penicillins.”
Fortunately, the patient was not allergic to penicillin.
As Amer checked another chart, a man approached him waving a little scrap of paper, frantic. A doctor had sent him across the hospital to hunt for a central veinous line, a type of IV critical for people with collapsed circulatory systems. Amer shook his head.
“I’m sorry, it’s not available,” he said. “Some days, we have piles of them. Some days, we don’t.”
‘My son, my son!’
By afternoon, Majid Abdullah was still waiting, the little beige box beside him slowly beeping. His father was in the corner again, praying. Abdullah’s cousins gathered around him. An uncle, Thamir Abdullah, paced with all the urgency that Iraq’s bureaucracy seemed to lack.
“Nobody has tried to explain this situation,” he said. “We don’t understand.”
In the little operations room, the red phone was quiet. A different employee was there, who said he had not been instructed to make calls. Frustrated, a doctor behind the half-moon desk picked up a receiver.
“Hello!” the doctor said. “Do you have any ventilator beds?”
“Wait, let me check,” the voice on the other end said. A long pause, during which a doctor explained that the ventilator beds for the ER are part of a long-range plan and that, no, the United States never invested much of its health-care reconstruction dollars here.
Abdullah’s father touched his son’s shoulder.
“There are no beds,” came the reply. The doctor began dialing again.
And then Abdullah’s father began beating his own chest and crying, “My son, my son!”
Three doctors crowded around Abdullah, who survived eight years of U.S. bombs, insurgent bombs, bullets and the chaos of life during war. They called for a defibrillator — available — and a certain cardiac drug, which was also available.
Then they closed the pink curtain. Security guards ushered Abdullah’s family into the lobby while a doctor pronounced his death, the only one of the shift.
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