LIVE SHELL REMOVED FROM MAN’S CHEST

Dominion, Volume 36, Issue 31, 31 October 1942, Page 7

LIVE SHELL REMOVED FROM MAN’S CHEST

N.Z. Surgeon’s Feat (Oflieial War Correspondent, J1.Z.8.F.) WESTERN DESERT, October 2G. Witbout knowledge of whether it would explode at any minute, a surgeon removed completely a concealed anti-tank shell from the chest of a voting gunner brought l in yesterday in a field ambulance. The operation is believed to be even more remarkable than the reported work of Russian surgeons, in that it was performed by our most forward anobile surgical group working a few miles from the El Alamein line. Today the gunner, who would have died on the journey to the base hospital, is sitting up in bed. talking cheerfully between occasional spells of heavy breathing. “I was crawling out from under a reconnaissance tank about 5.30 yesterday morning when something hit me in the back and knocked me to the ground unconscious,” he told me. “Some time later I came to and it felt as if a terrific weight was forcing me down on my back. My legs and arms were absolutely stiff. I called out and they carried me down here.” The doctor, Major Donald McKenzie, Auckland, found that a shell about eight inches long and two inches In diameter had entered the maids back near his spine and had been deflected to the left, narrowly missing his heart and lodging itself in the pleural cavity. His left lung was deflated. All the doctor could see of the shell was the nose, tightly enclosed in the skin of the man’s left side. Doctor’s Difficult Task. No instrument the doctor had would grip the slippery projectile and to get an instrument under the base of it he had to cut through one rib. Within 20 minutes after the patient was carried to the surgery tent the shell was removed and he had more than an even chance of living. The shell is still thought to be dangerous, and is lying in a pit outside the dressing station awnit ing ideatiliealion. The man is in a tent with several other severely wounded soldiers, whose chances of living would have been slight without the prompt attention

they have been given by the mobile group which came forward on the night of the big attack- and attended head, chest and abdominal wounds. The doctor and his anaesthetist and their orderlies worked through the noise of an artillery barrage, dive-bombing and the constant roar of traffic passing their desert surgery. The battle began at 10, and at midnight the first of a number of major operations they made in 24 hours began. This small mobile surgical group, working with forward dressing stations, is a new development in medical work.

Major Donald McKenzie, is a .son of the late Rev. J. D. McKenzie, Epsom, was in practice in Auckland as a surgeon and was a member of tlie honorary visiting staff of the Auckland Hospital before joining a military hospital unit in June, 1940, with the rank of captain. He has been attached to two different New Zealand base hospitals in Egypt, but was in the forward areas during tlie German advance in the earlier part of tliis year. Major McKenzie graduated M.B. and Ch.B. at Otago University before he was 21 and after spending two years as a house surgeon at tlie Auckland Hospital be went to Englund, where he gained the F.R.C.S., London. . Later he went to America for study in neurosurgery, which is concerned with the brain and spinal cord, and he specialized in this for a number of years before his departure on active service.