Blow in the back of the neck at age 17, it's the trauma surgeon who is now leading the doctors against gun violence and the NRA

Meagan Flynn, The Washington Post

published

8:20 am PST, Wednesday 14 November 2018

Joseph Sakran was on a playground when the bullet went through his throat.

It was a Friday night in 1994 in Fairfax, and Sakran was 17 years old. The high school student had started the night at a football game at the school and had finished bloody to death in the emergency room. The stray shot, fired into the crowd in the middle of a teenage brawl, broke Sakran's trachea, severed his carotid artery and paralyzed his vocal cord.

But Sakran was one of the lucky ones. Trauma surgeons at Inova Fairfax Hospital saved his life – and his voice.

And now, it's stronger than ever.

Two decades later, Sakran himself became a trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and is an unofficial leader in the medical community's fight against gun violence, a move that has accelerated the last week after the National Rifle Association ordered doctors to "stay on their way". rather than "the opinion on gun policy."

Dozens of doctors responded with both graphic and intimate stories of gun violence in their operating rooms, each with the Twitter hashtag #ThisIsOurLane, as Frances Stead Sellers of the Washington Post had previously reported. For Sakran, that could not seem more true. He launched the ThisIsOurLane page on Twitter on Saturday, turning it into a window into the daily experiences of doctors who are shooting bullets into bodies. In a few days, it has gathered more than 10,000 followers.

"Having been shot in the throat, this issue has been close to my heart for so many years," Sakran told the newspaper. "But once the NRA released this statement and actually tried to undermine our role in gun violence and the resolution of the public health crisis, the conversation has reached a different level." united the medical community. "

Sakran knew that he wanted to become a trauma surgeon almost immediately after his convalescence. While the doctors were still tearing the scar tissue from his trachea, he successfully applied to George Mason University. He made his life-saving debut training as a doctor and firefighter at Fairfax before graduating from Ben Gurion University's Faculty of International Medicine for Health. In fact, he completed his surgery residency at Inova Fairfax Hospital, where he had been treated.

He trained alongside the same surgeons who saved his life when he was a teenager.

"It was impressive to say the least," Sakran said. "For me, the most rewarding opportunity has been to give someone else the same luck as these surgeons."

Sakran began advocating for the prevention of gun violence early in his career, when he began speaking to students from disadvantaged communities about his own foray into gun violence. This became particularly noticeable this year, however, as a result of mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, when Sakran founded "Docs Demand Action."

The network of physicians has mobilized to urge lawmakers to fund research on gun violence more heavily than Congress has funded research into other public health crises, such as as road accidents or fatal diseases. Congress has not substantially funded research on gun violence since 1996, the year of the adoption of the Dickey amendment. The measure does not necessarily prohibit research on gun violence, but restricts research in favor of "gun control", which has had a deterrent effect on funds allocated to research on gun violence in Canada. wider.

The amendment, supported by the NRA, addressed the concerns of gun groups that doctors would try to lobby for anti-gun targets – just as the NRA has accused doctors of doing so last week.

"People want to polarize this debate but no one wants to remove the guns." It's not what we say, "Sakran said. "There is not a single solution to that – part of that is developing the right data and good research to understand what solutions we need to implement, and we do not want to continue to see these senseless tragedies. arrive at our trauma centers day after day and day. "

The NRA criticized the doctors last week after the American College of Physicians released a paper that also pleaded for further research on the effectiveness of various restrictions on firearms and firearms. other risk factors for armed violence. It included support for universal background checks; advise patients on the storage of firearms at home safe for children; taking into account waiting times before the purchase of firearms, to eventually reduce suicides; and, perhaps the most shocked to the NRA, the ban on owning semi-automatic weapons.

"Someone should tell the anti-gun doctors who are so important to stay in their hallway," wrote the NRA in a tweet referring to the commentary shredding the ACP newspaper. "Half of the articles in Annals of Internal Medicine insist on gun control."

#ThisIsOurLane's answers from doctors have invited the ANR to hospitals, sharing pictures of blood on the floor, blood on their scrubs, waiting room where surgeons must inform family members that their loved one is dead. The movement broke out the night of the shooting in Thousand Oaks, California, and in the days that followed.

Sakran explained, however, that doctors were frustrated that the thousands of gunshots that surgeons treat every year in their hospitals will never receive the same attention.

Those who die in his operating room become "frozen in my memory," he said. Often he is the one who talks to families in the waiting room, and sometimes his scrubs are bloody, so he has to change them beforehand. Families are sometimes inconsolable but at other times, says Sakran, they want to tell him about the person they lost.

A lot of them are young, he said, remembering himself that night in 1994.

"Sometimes I think about what my own family must have felt when the surgeon came out to talk to them," he said.