• The trial of the November 13 attacks opened on September 8 before the specially composed Assize Court.

    Twenty men appear, six of whom are being tried in their absence.

  • After having heard for nearly five weeks, the testimonies of the civil parties of the various scenes of crime, this Thursday, it is representatives of the medical profession who recounted this evening of horror.

  • The doctors of the Raid and the BRI confide in particular the difficult care of the victims of the Bataclan.

At the specially composed Assize Court in Paris,

All the members of the intervention forces say it: exercises are an integral part of their job. They make it possible to repeat the gestures, to create automatisms and a team spirit. But everyone also recognizes it: there is sometimes a world between theory and reality. On November 12, 2015, when Matthieu Langlois, resuscitator attached to the Raid since 2008, was mobilized on a simulated mass killing, the victims were supermarket mannequins. On their foreheads, we can clearly mark “1”, “2” or “3” depending on the severity of their injuries. The practitioner will discover the next day, in the Bataclan pit, that on the victims, the real ones, those in flesh and blood, ink flows because of sweat and blood and renders this crucial information illegible.

"It was even more complicated than what we had anticipated", confides, straight as an "i", at the bar of the specially composed Assize Court, this doctor with a shaved head and piercing blue eyes. If in his voice, no emotion appears, his words tell of the amazement by discovering, around 11 pm, this evening of November 13, 2015, “bodies on the sidewalks” in front of the concert hall. As soon as they arrived, the police shouted to them "take refuge, it's shooting". "This is where I realized that reality was going to be much more difficult" than the multiple exercises he had gone through. Almost instantly, however, the reflexes return. “Our mission is to assess those who died before our arrival, the seriousness of the injuries of others, organize an evacuation loop,” he explains.

"The obsession is to take care of the victims as quickly as possible"

The operation is eminently perilous, the terrorists are still entrenched upstairs with hostages, the deminers have not been able to inspect the building.

Only special forces doctors are allowed to enter the room.

The others, those of the Samu, firefighters, receive the victims outside the security perimeter and organize transfers to the hospital.

Evacuating the wounded before an assault is unprecedented.

But a race against time is underway: in war medicine - and that's what it is all about - every minute counts, in particular because of the nature of the injuries, mainly hemorrhages and respiratory distress .

“Saving time on the evacuation is already saving time on the injury.

Wanting to do surgery in the Bataclan would have been a serious mistake, ”insists Denis Safran, doctor of the BRI, the intervention force of the Paris police headquarters.

He entered the room half an hour before, at 10:30 p.m.

The able-bodied victims were called to stand up and leave the room, quickly imitated by those more lightly injured.

The most serious cases now remain.

"The obsession is to take care of the victims as quickly as possible, even if some had the impression that they had waited a long time", insists at the helm this talkative septuagenarian, white hair and thin-rimmed glasses on his nose .

"Save under threat"

In the pit, the five mobilized doctors practically no medical gesture, a few tourniquets at most. “To save under threat is to make very simple gestures and evacuate”, insists Matthieu Langlois. To do this, we must first assess the severity of injuries to each other. Denis Safran likes to repeat that his most useful tool that evening was a pair of scissors for cutting clothes and thus inspecting wounds. This work has sometimes been reduced, in a caricatured way, to saying who will live or die. A shortcut may be induced by this term of “sorting” patients. "I don't really like this word, triage, even if that's what we do", continues the practitioner, who prefers the words "evaluation" or "prioritization". "We must say who has no chance to pass the door of the Bataclan,who has a chance of surviving if they are taken out very quickly, who can survive without being caught immediately, ”he explains.

However, this task is based on clinical criteria. Does the victim speak? Are his mucous membranes discolored? How does she breathe? “This assessment requires a lot of medical expertise,” insists Matthieu Langlois. And coolness. At the helm, he recounts the memory of this woman injured in the head. “I decided to evacuate other more urgent wounded. She was so affected, I wanted to give real chances to "survivable" victims. He will learn the next day that she died in hospital shortly after arriving. Conversely, Denis Safran found himself facing a man shot in the chest. On paper, he should have a "suffocating pneumothorax." "But he's fine, he's not pale, he's breathing as normally as possible." He will be evacuated half an hour later,without his condition worsening. “It's a miracle,” comments the president. "No, but it was weird," the doctor retorts.

That evening, 364 people injured at the Bataclan but also on the Parisian terraces and at the Stade de France were transferred to the AP-HP hospitals.

At the height of the night and day of November 14, ten operating theaters at Pitié-Salpêtrière "turned" at the same time.

Of all these patients, only four died in hospital, including two upon arrival.

Probably thanks to this work carried out upstream.

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  • Paris

  • Attacks of November 13

  • Bataclan

  • Hospital

  • Justice