Every morning, patients arrive on the 2nd floor of the Montreal Heart Institute (MHI) and await their operation with a mixture of hope and fear. A stress that Rawad Rmeily has seen thousands of times since his first critical patient in danger of death 21 years ago when he was a young military nurse in Lebanon.
Mr. Rmeily, 45, arrived in Canada in 2005 with his wife, Charlie, also a nurse. Both joined the ICM in 2006 after refresher courses. After working in intensive care, Mr. Rmeily is now deputy coordinator of the operating room, which includes seven operating rooms, where surgeons are surrounded by a small army of respiratory therapists, nurses, perfusionists and others personal.
“For more than 10 years, every day, he has helped me coordinate activities surrounding the organization of cardiac surgical interventions,” says his boss, Julie Richard, operating room coordinator, who wrote to La Presse about him. “He has the composure and organizational ability of an air traffic controller in a work environment where there are a lot of moving parts,” adds Ms. Richard. She believes that her innate qualities were also accentuated by her experience as a military nurse. She also emphasizes that her assistant has the gift of giving confidence to people who are going to have surgery.
Born near Zahle, a predominantly Christian town, Mr. Rmeily remembers the event that ended his childhood: “I was 12 or 13, my brother and I were in a scout camp. There was a bombing near the school where we were. We ran between the wounded to get home. »
Shortly after, Mr. Rmeily joined the Lebanese Red Cross youth program and joined an operational team at age 19.
After his studies at university and a year as a nurse at Riyak hospital, in his native region, he was called to do his one-year military service in the Lebanese army. “It’s an experience that gives maturity that you don’t normally have at 22, 23,” says Mr. Rmeily. A perspective he carries into his current job at ICM, which he speaks enthusiastically about, a position in a high-intensity environment that places him “close to patients and close to staff.”
But in September 2001, he was aboard an ambulance dispatched to eastern Lebanon, near the Syrian border, to rescue two soldiers injured by drug traffickers. One had bullets in his legs, the other had a bullet lodged very close to his heart.
“In the region, the hospital was not equipped for this. […] We drove towards Beirut and the military hospital. »
Mr. Rmeily found himself, at age 23, treating a soldier his age with a bullet lodged in a heart artery. “Unfortunately we weren’t well equipped, we intubated him in the ambulance and then we had no blood, just fluid. And he was bleeding a lot. »
The leg injured survived, but the chest injured did not.
“If he had been brought to a modern hospital in time, I am sure he would have survived. But that evening, we were not able to provide the best care. We don’t have what we need. […] Me, I lack experience. The doctor too, he’s 26, just out of university. This boy was unlucky. »
This is the complete opposite of the conditions in which he today welcomes ICM patients, who have everything that modern medicine can offer.
And if this memory remains vivid, it has in no way dampened his optimism, says Mr. Rmeily.
“What I did when I arrived was take my experience and provide care by being human with people. People are very stressed when they arrive in the operating room and they see me when they arrive. I have an approach that I have acquired over time which allows me to bring back security, confidence, that we are there like family, that we are there for you. So after that I see the patient loosen up a little, he has confidence. He starts talking to me about something else, about his family, his children. »And that’s very good, says Mr. Rmeily.
“Here, it’s extraordinary compared to what we experienced in Lebanon. I tell patients that they are well looked after. “Everyone is specialized to the max. The technology is there, so the odds are in your favor.” »
