When a teenage boy whose arm had been almost completely ripped off entered the hospital, Dr. Nott knew he needed some help to save the boy's life. So he consulted with a fellow doctor back home in the UK -- via text message.
Vascular surgeon David Nott has seen a lot of difficult cases working as a volunteer for medical charity Doctors Without Borders in Rutshuru, the Congo. But when a teenage boy whose arm had been almost completely ripped off entered the hospital, Dr. Nott knew he needed some help to save the boy’s life. So he consulted with a fellow doctor back home in the UK—via text message.
Dr. Nott wasn’t clear on what had happened to the boy—he may have been bitten by a hippotamus while fishing, or have been injured in rebel army warfare. Whatever the case, the arm was infected and gangrenous, and badly in need of treatment. Dr. Nott knew that to save the boy, he would need to do a forequarter amputation, removing the boy’s arm all the way to the collarbone. Because Dr. Nott had never done the procedure before, he sent a text message to Meirion Thomas, a professor at London’s Royal Masden Hospital, who was familiar with the technique.
“I texted him and he texted back step by step instructions on how to do it,” Dr. Nott told BBC News.
Thanks to the SMS instruction, Dr. Nott successfully performed the lifesaving procedure.
“It was touch and go whether he would make it so when I saw his face on the [Doctors Without Borders] website afterwards, it was a real delight,” he said.