Nepal earthquake: NZ-based doctor ignores own injury to help at Base Camp

Dr Rachel Tullet helped keep 25 injured people alive until they could be evacuated.

Survivors of the avalanche at Everest Base Camp have described how a New Zealand-based doctor helped save the lives of 25 critically injured people, despite being wounded herself. She later stitched up her own leg without anaesthetic.

When the avalanche triggered by the 7.9-magnitude Nepalese earthquake struck, Dr Rachel Tullet, 34, an emergency and wilderness medical specialist living in Christchurch, was swept on to a rock and buried under ice crystals for several minutes.

She said: "I realised I'd injured my leg, but I was just amazed that I'd survived it. And in the scale of what happened to other people, it just didn't even register."

She immediately sprang into action and led an operation that helped keep 25 seriously injured people - 19 Nepalese and 6 foreign climbers - alive until they were evacuated by helicopter nearly 24 hours later. Two later died in Kathmandu.

David Hamilton, expedition leader of the Jagged Globe team whose camp was in the middle of the avalanche's path, said: "What she didn't tell anyone is that she'd injured her leg quite badly. She'd torn her ligaments, cracked her patella, and had a gaping wound in the middle of her leg, which she stitched up herself the next day without anaesthetic."

Dr Tullet, originally from Kent, Britain, had come as a volunteer to work in Everest ER, the medical tent at the mountain's Base Camp run by the Himalayan Rescue Association.

Selina Dicker, 38, a climber from London who spent the day in the tent caring for a teammate, saw Dr Tullet in action and said it was in large part due to her actions that so many people had survived.

"She was an absolute superwoman. I've no doubt far more people would have died if she hadn't been there. She said she had been caught in the avalanche, but she never once gave away that she was injured.

"She organised the whole thing, kept completely calm in this frankly crazy situation, and that was on top of treating all the patients - at one point she must have had 30 people on stretchers - as well as certifying the dead and organising all the patients to be carried down to another camp.

"She's incredibly self-effacing, though, so she'll probably never admit to it."

When contacted, Dr Tullet said it had been a case of "extraordinary teamwork which saw everybody come together in a quite unbelievable way", and she paid credit to her colleague Megan Walmsley, an Australian anaesthetist, and the leaders of the expeditions who had helped support the medical team.

She is now back in New Zealand recovering, but is planning to return to Nepal in a fortnight to volunteer her medical expertise.

"I went through the Christchurch earthquake [working in A&E] so I just feel so sad for Nepal. It's such a long recovery process, and that's in a developed country, so I want to come back to provide what help I can."

The severity of the injuries was "consistent with a bomb blast", but one of the hardest things was knowing so many of those killed or injured.

Observer