Patients are coping with unbearable pain and clinics fill up faster than they can be staffed. What can be done about a health crisis worsening at breathtaking speed?
‘Knife to skin.” I’d never heard the expression before. Nor had I heard the crack of a fibula bone being cut in two. But we all hear it. Knife to skin. Bone-cutter to bone. And now a new sound: the urgent buzzing of a power saw.
Mr David Lewis – a consultant vascular surgeon who worked in Christchurch, New Zealand, until the 2011 earthquake obliterated his home – moves the saw closer to the newly formed opening in Kay Watkins’ solitary leg. He positions it just below the knee.
