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FIRST EVACUATION
A double
success
We asked Dr Pascal Rey-Herme to tell us about some
of the first medical evacuations he was involved with
for International SOS. Here he remembers one
afternoon in 1985 when his team received two
simultaneous calls for help.
AJAKARTA-BASED church which ran a
small remote mission in Kalimantan,
Indonesia, heard that the wife of a foreigner
working in the area had arrived at the
mission’s medical center in premature labor.
At that time, the only way to communicate
with the mission was by radio. We already
had an arrangement with Singapore Radio
(which supported shipping fleets in that part
of the world) whereby we could patch our
telephone with their radio. In this way, we
were able to establish a radio link with the
mission.
Vital help and support
Through the night an obstetrician and
pediatrician in Singapore gave vital help and
support to the mission’s health officer by
phone while the baby was delivered and then
resuscitated. At the same time, we were
assembling a pediatric team from Singapore
and equipping an HS 748 aircraft to fly out
to Kalimantan as soon as possible.
Our team in Jakarta managed to contact
the head of immigration in Banjarmasin at
home that night to convince him to issue a
travel document for the new-born baby.
A challenging flight
Unfortunately the landing field at the mission
was too short for the HS 748, so we arranged
for a light aircraft belonging to the
missionaries to meet our incoming team at
Banjarmasin and take them and whatever
equipment they could fit into the small
aircraft on to the mission.
From Jakarta we contacted the Indonesian
authorities to get landing clearances at
Banjarmasin airport at sunrise (the airport
had no facilities for night-time take-offs or
landings).
The pediatrician, the mother and her
premature baby were squeezed into the light
aircraft and taken to Banjarmasin, then
transferred to the HS 748. The head of
immigration was waiting at the aircraft with
the necessary travel documents, and the
mother and baby were rushed to Singapore.
Weighing just 1.9kg, the baby was taken
straight to hospital where I’m pleased to say
both mother and baby recovered well from
their ordeal.
Another emergency
At the same time as we were harnessing our
resources to save the baby, another request
came in, this time from Malaysia. An
American oil worker had been transferred
from an offshore platform to his company
clinic in Kerteh. Suffering from a heart
condition, he needed urgent transfer to
hospital in Singapore. As the HS 748 was
already being used to transport the baby, the
only aircraft available to us was a much
smaller plane called a Queen Air.
With our Singapore escort team already
flying to Indonesia to care for the baby, I went
on the journey to Kerteh to escort the patient
to Singapore. On arrival I discovered that he
was 1.95m tall and weighed over 140 kg.
(These days it’s standard procedure to check
this type of information before a flight.) With
considerable difficulty we got the patient, the
pilot and me on board. We then flew back to
Singapore where we landed at the same time
as the baby. I will always remember one of
our Singaporean nurses exclaiming at the
time: “So, you put the big patient in the small
plane and the small patient in the big plane!”
After carefully extracting the patient from
the small plane, we transferred him safely to
hospital. Facing many challenges, we had
successfully completed two evacuations at the
same time. ■
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