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9781449707750

Called Out

by
  • ISBN13:

    9781449707750

  • ISBN10:

    1449707750

  • Format: Paperback
  • Copyright: 2010-11-12
  • Publisher: Westbow Press
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Summary

This book, In a sense, Is a journey of discovery. How a situation that seems to be about a certain event (such as a war) can serendipitously teach you about something else entirely (such as your life). While sharing his experiences with us, Dr. Warren also opens the door into his life, and therein we find that we are all on the same journey. Human issues (illness, death, marital problems) arise and redefine "normal" for a man who thought he knew where his life was going. A brain surgeon who was accustomed to being in charge of everything, Dr. Warren was thrust into a situation in which he had no control over anything. Sent to war at the worst possible time, he had to learn to rely on God because he had nothing left. Underneath the surface of this detailed look at wartime brain surgery, we find a man's intensely honest revelation of God's work in his life. As we read tales of war and enter the lives of its participants and victims, we realize that we are all Called Out.

Supplemental Materials

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

Excerpts

By Jan. 3, 2005, I was getting used to being in Iraq. I gave up trying to smell good. I forgot what it was like to walk to the pantry and find a snack. I got used to walking through the hospital and seeing someone with both their arms blown off. By that time, I had performed a few emergency surgeries, placed ICP monitors in four or five people, nervously sat through eight or nine mortar attacks, and generally gotten the hang of working in a combat environment.I also became accustomed to a beeper call to the Emergency Room (ER) that could be for a soldier who hurt his back lifting his rucksack or an Iraqi 5-year-old with her face burned off from a firebomb someone threw into her house. I expected every call to represent something horrible I was going to see or something foul to smell. I did not yet know that these would become memories burned into my olfactory cortex and hardwired into my emotion. Odds are that when you burn something in your kitchen, your brain tells us that it's just overcooked bacon that you smell. To this day, my brain tells me something quite different.Once the "major combat" in Iraq was over, and the Iraqi Army was disbanded, a new and altogether different war started, silently declared and lethally executed. Islamic extremists began to stream into Iraq from all over the world, bringing with them a form of fighting that would greatly affect the lives of many other people, including the medics at the 332nd AFTH at Balad.The bad guys, realizing the futility of lining up to fight the United States in combat, began setting up bombs everywhere, content to blow up as many people as possible and attempt to break their resolve.I was trained in a very busy trauma center in Pittsburgh, Pa. Allegheny General Hospital is a great place to learn neurosurgery, and I remain thankful that I trained there. Some of the giants of my specialty were there, and by the time I graduated I was a competent and very experienced neurosurgeon, and was very good at taking care of badly injured people.After I left Pittsburgh, the Air Force sent me to Wilford Hall Medical Center in San Antonio. Wilford Hall is the Air Force's largest hospital, and serves as a Level-I trauma center for the city of San Antonio. I refined my trauma experience there. Whereas in Pittsburgh most of the neurotrauma had been accidental, in San Antonio a good percentage of it was related to gang violence and domestic disputes. I took care of patients with gunshot wounds to the head and spine, stabbings that involved the arteries to the brain, and blunt head injuries from baseball bats, hammers, and clubs of various sorts. By the time I left for Iraq, I was not worried about my ability to take care of injured people.In April of 1995, I was a senior in medical school in Oklahoma City. I was in a nearby community completing a month-long rotation in rural medicine on April 19. At about 9 a.m. that day, I heard a low-pitched sound, like a thump. A sort of sub-sonic feeling, like being pushed on the chest, accompanied the sound. Within a few minutes, I had heard that the source of the sound was the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, and that a lot of people had been killed. I remember feeling so angry that someone would kill other people in such a way. On that fateful day, at least 168 people died. The total was probably 169 since there was a leg found without a matching body. I was more than 20 miles away when the bomb went off, yet I heard the sound and felt the shock. I wondered what it must have felt and sounded like closer up.It would take me 10 years to find out. Early in the morning of Jan. 3, 2005, I was walking through one of the hospital tents into the central area between the operating rooms. Stepping around a corner, I saw Nate sitting on an unused operating room table waiting for the day's work to start. Just as I entered the room, a massive explosion occurred, and the force knocked me off my feet. Nate was thrown off the surgery table, and landed on his knees just in front of me. The sound was still ringing in my ears when Nate looked up and said, "Well, Doc, I guess we better get the O.R. ready."Within seconds, the Alarm Red siren went off, adding its whining roar to the mix of sounds, some gunfire from outside the fence, a lot of people shouting, trying to figure out what just happened. I was sure that we'd been hit with mortars or rockets. I was wrong.A car bomb had been detonated just outside the wall of the base, about 250 yards from where Nate and I were. A few minutes later, the first casualties arrived, and the trauma team was called to the ER. Complete chaos arose, as more than 20 extremely injured people arrived simultaneously. It was my second "mass casualty" experience, the first being the day before as I described in my letter home above. This time, however, it was close enough to feel. That made it much more real, and much more personal. The guy who detonated this bomb intended to kill us -- the very people in charge of treating both the good guys and the bad guys.We had trained in the military triage system prior to deploying. The system is designed to avoid treating one person who is doomed to die by their injury while another person who could be saved dies because you didn't treat them soon enough. Prevent unnecessary loss of life by saving those who can be saved and letting those who cannot be saved go. This concept is basically never used in the U.S. because of our almost unlimited resources and a medicolegal climate that falsely makes people believe that if the doctors do their jobs right everyone can survive. We give every patient all we have, and we try to save everyone.In a mass casualty situation, someone has to be in charge. In Iraq that person was a senior surgeon, dubbed the Trauma Czar. The Czar was responsible for keeping everyone cool; making sure the process was working, and assigning tasks to appropriate people. For my part, every patient who had an obvious head injury was my responsibility, and I had to sort out who went to the scanner and to the operating room first. The day before I had done well; my decisions in the ER as to who was the most severely injured were proved out in the CT scanner and in the OR.But on this day, I made a mistake. Two patients had obvious head injuries. One man was awake and talking, the other was unconscious. Both had bleeding scalp lacerations and needed to be operated on. I took the unconscious man to the CT scanner first, and while he was there, the other man had a seizure and went into a coma. The scan on patient one showed that most of his injury was in the scalp, and his unconsciousness was merely a sign of his severe concussion.Patient No. 2 was much more severely injured, and fortunately, I got him to the operating room before it was too late. But I saw firsthand the importance and the dangers involved in trying to decide who gets to live and who gets to wait.That day, walking through the sea of broken bodies, time seemed to stand still. Fresh from the explosion only moments before, men smelled like gunpowder and blood. A pile of blown off body parts was in the middle of the room, to be identified later. Clothes were cut off, IVs started, airways established. Screams and moans from dying men filled the air. I saw a man with no face, air bubbling out of his gaping throat where there used to be a mouth. An anesthetist was trying to insert a breathing tube into the redness.The cords of death entangled me; the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me.

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