The Everest dream

Kathmandu

In 60 Parachute Field Hospital there is a saying, “Be careful what you wish for, because you end up getting an overdose of what you want.”

As a young probationer I found the achievements of Major N Linyu very inspiring. She went out to explore new lands, with toil and self-sacrifice fitted to herself to become a champion in the field of mountaineering, and became the first Army Medical Corps officer to summit Mt Everest. To imitate her was my dream.

But little did I know that after years of training in the Himalayas, my dream would turn into a nightmare and I would nearly die in it.

On the evening of May 15, 2015, I squeezed under a dome tent with a dozen other climbers. We all were keyed up for our journey back to Kathmandu from the Everest Base Camp. We sat on torn mattresses facing each other under the tent. We sat there for what seemed like years.

Photo: Courtesy Dr Ritesh Goel

Everyone inside the tent had showered an hour back, in the heavy rainfall that had hit the Syangboche airstrip, from where we were being evacuated the next day. It was cold and to most of us who were drenched, it felt like deep winter — but within a few minutes the butane gas stove was choking us.

I put my rucksack down on the floor with my climbing gear propped between my legs, and my down jacket on the backside, I had a makeshift pillow. I tried to sleep.

“Close your eyes, and time moves faster”, my team leader Maj RS Jamwal often quoted. I didn’t get much sleep. We, as a team, had been awake most of the time in the last 20 days — ever since we woke up in the early morning on April 25, 2015 and started our climb over the Khumbu Icefall. Of all the obstacles to those ascending Mt Everest, the Khumbu Icefall is perhaps the most treacherous. In those 20 days we saw terrible things and more, we lived through them.

We survived devastating earthquake, numerous aftershocks, and the heavy rains that triggered wave of landslides from these precarious slopes in the Everest Region. This had been hard on our minds as well as bodies. The damage was not obvious in the euphoria of survival. But over the days, a number of cases of post traumatic stress disorder were diagnosed. Sometimes my team mates were unable to fall asleep — due to the fear of the flashbacks and the faces of the dead mountaineers that haunted their dreams.

In the months since then, I have come to realise that those 20 days in the mountains changed me forever. Over the last three years, during my visit from Kedarnath, India to Nepal, I have seen many things — communities broken through natural calamities, families broken by death and diseases. I wouldn’t take any of it back, not a single second, but it begins to feel less strange to admit to being a little broken myself after witnessing it all.

I have renewed respect for those colleagues of mine who continue mission works year after year, working side by side, without ever forgetting who we are, and the Army Medical Corps we represent.

Friends and journalists have asked how this experience has affected me. I have often dodged the question by saying that it’s not about me. But I felt like I was working in a war zone.

Now, my teammates seem dearer, and the plight of many people strikes me more than it used to do before this mission.

For the record and in fact, I am fine. Let’s get back to those who are not.

More than 100 people arrived on stretchers, suffering fractures and head injuries. Sadly, there were 20 dead among them, whom we placed in a respectful private area.

For those who were alive, I had less than three minutes for each injured person, in my triage tent, sometimes a little more. During these three minutes I exchanged a few words with the ones who could talk and were conscious. “Are you okay? What’s your name?” I asked. It’s a strange phrase. Despite their exhaustion and fear, they had arrived, they were alive. They smiled. Many also thanked me.

My fellow teammates assisted me with the difficult task of carrying patients across the terrain. All who were helping had already been through a traumatic experience. A wonderful team of skilled people also began to assist — mountain guides, doctors from other climbing teams, and many others.

We worked to quickly triage, carry out life and limb saving interventions, provide pain relief and the best compassionate care we could to all. A careful search effort through the devastated camps brought more patients. A huge effort was needed to transport all our patients to the makeshift hospital established in a kitchen tent — a good 500 metres trek away from our damaged mid section of the Everest Base Camp, at 17590 feet.

Photos: Courtesy Dr Ritesh Goel

In the makeshift hospital, we cared for over 80 patients, including 25 with serious life-threatening injuries.

Throughout the evening and night, I stabilised and treated the patients who had suffered head injuries. Dr Ellen Gallant from the USA helped me handle the head injury patients all night long. We had enough medications and medical supplies, courtesy the extra medical funds received by the MT Dte and AFMSD, New Delhi, India. There were doctors and mountain guides from across the globe. They all worked incredibly long hours, helping in the relief efforts.

I saw a Sherpa die two metres from where I was standing. We spent minutes doing intensive revival work, giving CPR, adrenaline shots, basically demonstrating the relentless commitment that goes toward saving a life.

Two earthquakes killed an estimated 8,500 people and injured another 20,000 in Nepal. While air evacuations from the mountains by helicopters were organised on an impressive scale for the seriously injured, others with conditions deemed not immediately life-threatening remained trapped in their villages, unable to access help.

The high altitude villages in the Everest region are far more difficult to access, and it takes more than a day to reach the small community of Khunde and Khumjung. It looks like heaven to me, kind of untouched postcard paradise. We were greeted with smiles and cheers by a beautiful group of men, women and children — so grateful for the relief work that was being done. However, they were hungry, incredibly poor, and virtually cut off from the essentials they needed. These people, like most, were living under tents, except that this camp was in a giant basin-like valley.

Logistically moving that many people, with the imminent monsoon and hurricane season lingering like a time bomb, was a terrifying reality that they all were facing. There was an area where tents were balanced precariously on the edge of a ditch that drops 10 feet into what was a river-bed. When rains fell a week ago, that ditch became a raging river and two children nearly lost their lives.

The treatment here was archaic, the conditions inhumane. The people I saw were obviously seriously unwell. Some were screaming, some blissfully quite, very few were clothed and during my visit, most stood in the open, naked and covered in rugs.

Photo: Courtesy Dr Ritesh Goel

My feelings are mixed and complex as always. This feels like the mission that I always knew I was going to do, ever since leaving the Base Camp. But I couldn’t enter a building without noting its exits and potential shelter points. The local markets down narrow ramshackle brick lanes in Namche Bazaar were reduced to a narrow strip of rubble. I loved those markets — the noise, the spices, the smells, and the women in bright saris squatting amidst their produce, grinning their gap toothed, paan stained smiles at me whilst trying to marry me off to their daughters.

The amazing thing is that the country has a spirit that very quickly gets under your skin. The people were friendly and welcoming, and everywhere I looked, I witnessed examples of human courage beyond imagination. They were sticking together through what has been the most devastating earthquake in a hundred years.

For me, Everest is no more just the highest mountain in the world; it is about the resilient doctors and locals who worked side by side enduring every single obstacle that came their way. Volunteering for such missions has its moments, but it’s those moments that make life worth living.

(Dr Goel is an Indian Army Major, Team Doctor of The Indian Army Mt Everest Massif Expedition 2015)

यो समग्री नेपाल१२३.com मा पुरै पढौं