Surgery without anesthesia is a miserable and brutal reality in Syria. Doctors report that demolished hospitals and humanitarian blockades have left some Syrians to suffer, awake, through amputations and Caesarean sections.
I saw similar horrors while working in a northern Syrian field hospital under airstrikes in August.
I operated on children who had the bone fragments of obliterated bystanders embedded in their skin. Children shot by snipers were pronounced dead in front of grieving parents. Civilians with bellies torn open from shelling held their intestines in their hands while pleading for help. Some lucky enough to have survived shrapnel wounds succumbed to gangrene and required amputations. The day before I left, a little boy whose crushed legs had been amputated asked me to bring him prosthetic limbs if I ever returned.