Surgeon recalls Bali bombings horror
'The most important thing I’ve learned is to live every day as you can, because you just never know what’s going to turn up on your doorstep'
On the 20th anniversary of the Bali bombings, Dr Graeme Southwick, an Australian plastic surgeon who worked on some 160 burn victims – including 60 severe cases – and helped save many lives in the aftermath, has recalled the frantic hours after terrorist blasts at two popular nightspots killed 202 people – including 88 Australians – and injured a further 209 people.
Southwick, now 75, is still treating some of the blast victims with lingering medical issues after their horrific injuries.
He told The AJN on Wednesday, the 20th anniversary: “It’s a memorial day for us … it brings back a lot of memories which we live with. The most important thing I’ve learned is to live every day as you can, because you just never know what’s going to turn up on your doorstep.”
Southwick also had a chance to reflect on the terrorist attack during an aliyah at St Kilda Shule on Yom Kippur.
The Melbourne surgeon was among Australian doctors and medical trainees who spent 14 hours at Denpasar Hospital in Bali treating the injured and preparing them for ambulance shuttles to Denpasar Airport.
He told The AJN 20 years ago, “When I saw the sheer number of injured people my mouth dropped. It was a scene of chaos. A lot of them had been given first aid, but there were some horrific internal injuries.”
With the local phone network jammed, Southwick and his wife Suzanne had asked their son Paul in Melbourne to track down phone numbers of Bali hospitals. He was later able to visit a number of hospitals and help casualties.
The Southwicks had been in Bali for a plastic surgery conference at which Southwick, then president of the Australasian Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, was presenting. The Kuta conference had ended, and the couple were holidaying about 10 minutes’ drive away when a phone call in the early hours of October 13, 2002, ended their break.
It was Paul anxiously ringing, surprised they had not heard the news.
“We were too far away to hear any explosions,” Suzanne had noted.
Graeme phoned Denpasar Hospital and battled local authorities to be let in.
Australian doctors, accompanied by Australian embassy staff, worked together, treating those who needed help most urgently, including people with partially severed limbs.
A few days later, drained and exhausted, the Southwicks returned to Australia.
“The good that’s come out of it is a little bit of reflection about how lucky we are as people to not have suffered, to be in a free world,” he said this week.
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