The doctor who treated Princess Diana in Paris for the first time shared shocking details of the night she died

More than 20 years after the death of Diana of Wales, the doctor MoSef Dahman, who treated her in the emergency room of the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, broke the silence to defend the work carried out by the team of specialists on the night of August 31, 1997.

Dahman was on duty the night of the accident. He was resting in the ward of the hospital when he was informed of the emergency admission of a “young woman”.

“They didn’t tell me it was Lady DiBut there had been a serious accident involving a young woman. The organization of the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital was very hierarchical. Then, when you got a call from a high level colleague, it meant the case was particularly serious “, he recalled in an exclusive interview carried out by the British newspaper Daily mail.

Arrival at Dahman emergency she found her intern in a corner of the room, overwhelmed by the gravity of the moment. It was then that the doctor, 33 at the time, was informed that the unconscious figure on the stretcher was none other than Diana, Princess of Wales.

“For any doctor, surgeon, it is of great importance to deal with such a young woman who is in this condition.. But, of course, even more if it’s a princess, ”he said.

When she arrived at the hospital, Diana had undergone an x-ray. The images showed that his chest was suffering from “very serious internal bleeding”.. As a result, he underwent chest drainage, removal of excess fluid from the chest cavity.

They operated on him in the emergency room

At 2.15 am, the situation of the Princess of Wales had worsened. He suffered a second cardiac arrest, needed more extreme surgery. She had an external cardiac massage and, while she was lying on the stretcher in the emergency room, they decided to perform the surgery.

The timing was “truly exceptional” and an indication of the gravity of her situation. “I did this procedure to allow you to breathe”, Dahman explained. “His heart could not function properly because it lacked blood,” he added.

Following the intervention, Dahman discovered that Diana had suffered a major tear in her pericardium, the membrane that protects the heart. The prognosis worsened. It was 2:30 am. It needed a miracle. Professor Alain Pavie, perhaps the best heart surgeon in France, was summoned to the emergency room. They had pulled him out of his bed. All hopes were placed in him.

Pavie decided that Diana should be transferred to one of the operating rooms in the hospital. He suspected that the main source of his internal bleeding had not yet been found. Further surgical exploration was necessary, revealing the most serious lesion: a tear in the upper left pulmonary vein, at the point of contact with the heart. Pavie sutured the wound.

But Diana’s heart had stopped before the surgical exploration and was not returning. “We tried electroshocks several times and, as he had done in the emergency room, heart massages”said Dahman. Epinephrine was administered. But we couldn’t make her heart beat again“. The team continued these resuscitation efforts for a full and ultimately unsuccessful hour.

“We fought hard, we tried hard, really, really hard.. Frankly, when you work in these conditions, you don’t notice the passage of time, ”Dahman said. “The only important thing is that we do everything we can for this young woman,” he added.

“We brought people to Pitié-Salpêtrière who were in a very bad state, more serious than Diana when she arrived. It is one of the best centers in France for this type of traumatic emergency.. And we saved some of those people, which made us especially happy and proud. But that did not happen in this case. We couldn’t save her. And that touched us a lot, ”he recalled.

At 4 a.m., the team, led by Pavie, agreed that nothing could be done to resuscitate their patient. It was a “collegial decision”, Dahman remembers. All resuscitation efforts have ceased. The extraordinary life of Diana, Princess of Wales, had come to an end.

The day after death

On leaving the operating room, the doctor was “exhausted” and dejected. “It’s always a big disappointment to see someone young leave us“said the specialist who still feels emotionally affected by what he went through.” You are also suffering from great physical exhaustion from the energy you have expended trying to save her. And so we were particularly devastated and tired. In the end, we were amazed, ”he recalls.

He called his manager to tell him what had happened and prepare him for the chaos that might ensue. accordingly, then returned to the guard room.

He was too tired and depressed to pay any attention to the French authorities, including President Jacques Chirac, who started arriving at the hospital early that morning, to pay tribute to Diana.

The bloodstained shoes

The doctor also said that in the days following the death of Prince Charles’ ex-wife, he witnessed an unpleasant and shameful aftermath. Some media tried to infiltrate the rooms and corridors of the hospital get closer to those who had cared for Diana.

“Pitié-Salpêtrière is a hospital público. The princess was treated in a building where there were other hospital patients. We’ve seen people disguise themselves as medics, push carts, try to get information. There was a lot of pressure on our security, ”he said.

An incident, which he had never spoken of before, was etched in his mind. “When I was treating Diana, I wore my white clogs. And obviously, in this situation, you don’t care about anything other than trying to save the patient. It was not until the next morning that I noticed that my hooves were stained with his blood, ”recalls the doctor. “Anyway, the hospital is very big and I was walking between the buildings, when a Frenchman approached me and said: ‘Ah, your hooves, they interest me. I want to buy them from you. There is blue blood in them ”. Horrified, Dahman refused and cleaned the clogs he had worn that night as soon as possible.

“When she’s a princess and you follow her funeral with billions of other people, and you’ve tried to save her, it obviously marks you. It marks your whole life. Because it’s so terrible that this beautiful person had such a tragic end, ”he added.

His own participation in the tragedy torments him. “It varies depending on what’s going on in my life,” he says. “When we get to August, I think about it. It was the year my son was born and of course every birthday I think about it “.

“I don’t come back to it all the time because so many years have passed. But every time a new book comes out on Diana’s death in France, it is sent to me. So unfortunately I have a collection of these books, ”the doctor said.

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