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Slán - Niall☘️ **
📻REAL LIFE AUDIO 👇🏽🎧
BRAIN Food: The Front Line
“After a mission to Rafah in early 2024, Nott described Gaza as “like no war zone I have ever witnessed” — citing, for example, the lack of oral antibiotics. What he didn’t mention is that he himself had become “quite poorly”: his way of saying that he’d nearly died.
“I got pneumonia. I got a really bad chest infection to the extent that I couldn’t even walk up the stairs.” He was staying in a house whose windows were blown out. “It was like -5C, with the wind coming through. I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t get the right antibiotics . . . My lips were blue. I thought, ‘I think I’m going to die.’”
His wife “went mental” and phoned “every person she could think of”. Nott was evacuated via Egypt. “I was lucky to get out.” Around that time, the World Health Organization warned that in Gaza, diseases could kill more than bombings. “Your mind has to be resilient to go to war zones. But you have to be physically resilient as well, and I’m not as physically resilient as I used to be.”
Nott’s experience allows him to advise doctors that sometimes, because of a lack of resources, they can’t act. “Hearing it from me is better than someone going in, thinking they can do something.” There would be no point doing the Kharkiv foot reconstruction in Gaza, because the patient needs to be immobilised for three weeks: “If he had to be evacuated very rapidly, he’s going to be dead.”
But Nott is angry at the targeting of medical facilities. “It’s not just Gaza. The hospital in Kharkiv was bombed. Health is used as a weapon of war — if you take out a hospital, you take out treatment for tens of thousands of people, and you make those people suffer more badly and try and leave . . . The Geneva Convention states that all hospitals should be protected. Every human being needs help when they’re injured, no matter what side they’re on.”
War doctor, Dr. David Nott speaking to the FT on his work in war zones around the world.
SOUL Food:
“Once you mess with your face you can’t get it back.”
LOL:
Kevin Bridges on Americans visiting Edinburgh Castle:
APPENDIX:
“If you’re not willing to downgrade your lifestyle for a year to have a lifestyle you want forever, you care too much what other people think.”
Jim Carrey
A.O.B.
That’s it for #155. Thank you for checking in.
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As always, mind how you go out there & slán agus beannacht - Niall