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Blog post:
EXPERIENCING A NUCLEAR BOMB ATTACK ~ Book Review
Date:
this blog came out some time before year 2017. A facebook blog app
ceased to function, and MEDIC's back-up captured the content but not the date of
writing.
If you are curious as to what day-by-day life is like if
you survive a nearby nuclear bomb detonation, blended with medical response
regimen, then the book "Hiroshima Diary" by Michihiko Hachiya, M.D. may be for
you. This non-fiction book is quite simply a direct translation of Dr.
Hachiya's everyday diary, starting on August 6, 1945: when suddenly a
strong flash of light appeared and he realized that in an instant, his clothes
had been completely stripped of him and his house was teetering and about to
collapse: "Garden shadows disappeared. The view where a moment
before all had been so bright and sunny was now dark and hazy. Through
swirling dust I could barely discern a wooden column that had supported one
corner of my house. It was leaning crazily and the roof sagged
dangerously."
Dr. Hachiya was the head of a hospital in Hiroshima, Japan at the time the
atomic bomb exploded. His diary reveals how he struggled, injured, to walk
from his house to the hospital with his wife, and then cared for patients as
best he and what was left of his staff could. Day by day for ~2 months,
Dr. Hachiya described the signs and symptoms of the vastly overwhelming number
of patients who flocked to the hospital, and how those signs & symptoms
strangely changed as the days went on. Read the play-by-play of what the
victims experienced, so many with an illness as-of-yet unknown to medical
science. "Hundreds of patients died during the first few days, then the
death rate declined. Now, it was increasing again." People who seemed to
be healing well from trauma injuries took turns for worse and died. Which
signs & symptoms spelled certain death, and which did not? What was this new
illness? How could the doctor solve the mystery? What common patterns in
signs & symptoms, and what tests could help reveal the answers of what was
happening to the patients? Though Dr. Hachiya wrote his diary with no
intention of publishing it, he did a great job in enabling the reader to feel
and experience these mysteries amidst giving care.
As if all of the above weren't enough, while the hospital remained structurally
in-tact as it was solidly built of material other than wood, a fire ripped
through it, most equipment and supplies were destroyed, electricity was out,
windows were blown out and storms were blowing in, etc. People who were
closest to the epicenter were more injured but further from the hospital than
people who happened to be nearer to the hospital when the bomb blew; hence what
initially seemed to be a reasonable number of patients walking in with less
severe injuries, turned to overwhelming numbers of patients hobbling in with
terribly more severe injuries and illness as time went on … This was, obviously,
quite a situation of
Disaster First Aid.
I reckon there are other first-hand accounts out there of experiencing a nuclear
bomb attack. If like me, you want to immerse yourself in it including from
the viewpoint of rendering medical care, then I highly recommend this book.
.
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