The medic’s trauma book
“They cannot knock on your house door, take you by the hand and bring you to the clinic. If you don’t ask for help, nobody will come.”
Story and photography by Stephen J. Thorne
As a member of 5 Field Ambulance in Afghanistan, medic Macha Khoudja-Poirier treated so many patients with such a variety of ills and injures, she didn’t know what more she could see to fill out her “trauma book.”
Better known in English as a casualty book, the journal is a log of the cases a medic handles, like the “life list” birders keep of the birds they see or the logbook a pilot maintains of the planes they fly and the hours spent airborne.
Khoudja-Poirier’s book covered the gamut.
There were skin infections, dust-filled eyes and twisted ankles; camel spider bites, head injuries, br...