Opinion: As a San Diego neurosurgeon, I see the devastating toll of the raised border wall (via latimesopinion )
At 2 in the morning and while I was caring for my hospitalized patients, my pager went off. The message was short: “30-year-old male. Unstable spinal fracture after border fall.” I think of all the similar pages I have received in my three years as a resident physician in neurosurgery in San Diego: young individuals with life-changing severe injuries that they sustained falling from the wall that separates the United States from Mexico.
Before seeing the patient, I took a moment to look at the MRI: He had a severe spinal cord injury. I walked over to the trauma unit and saw the terrified young man, lying immobile with a collar supporting his neck. Instead of concerned family, he was surrounded by Border Patrol officers. I sensed his despair and then his relief when I spoke to him in Spanish. I told him that we would care for him as best we could, but that he would need surgery. He started to cry.
This is a story I know all too well. As the son of Mexican immigrants who crossed the same border in the 1980s when fleeing violent threats in their hometown, I know that my patient’s life story could so easily have been mine or my parents’. Raising me in an impoverished migrant community in South Los Angeles, my parents instilled in me the values that I live by, to help the helpless.
When I care for people fleeing similar violence, I know that they are searching for the same things that my parents did and that we all do: safety and a chance for a better life for their children. As a neurosurgeon, I am horrified by the rash of traumatic brain and spinal cord injuries caused by falls from the border wall.
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