Long road to healing of physical, mental wounds for victims of Paris attacks

One bullet tore into Amandine Andretto’s right leg, shattering her tibia.

Another hit her in the arm. For three interminable hours, her parents knew that she had been at the Bataclan concert hall but did not know if she was among the dozens massacred there.

Finally, as rescue services rushed her to a triage and treatment centre, her mother reached her on the phone.

The lawyer, 32, is lucky to be alive, felled by the extremists’ first sprays of gunfire in the November 13 attack but saved by three officers from an elite police unit who dragged her out of the hall during the subsequent hostage-taking.

But it will be at least three months before she can even begin the process of starting to walk again, her father said.

“It is going to be long,” Jean-Pierre Andretto said. “She has two or three more surgeries.”

Simply by staying alive, hundreds of people wounded in the Paris attacks are defying the Islamic State extremists who sought to kill them. Yet that defiance is coming at an enormous price.

Some were in cardiac arrest when they were evacuated to Paris hospitals but now look like they will pull through. Scores more with no visible physical scars are wounded inside, haunted by what they saw or did to survive France’s worst attack since the Second World War.

But for those with smashed spines and other devastating wounds, the months and years ahead could be a daily battle.

The high-velocity rounds fired at close range and exploding suicide belts packed with shrapnel did appalling and, in many cases, lasting damage.

More than 350 people were wounded along with the 130 killed, French officials said.

The fact that the death toll has not been rising daily over the past week is a remarkable testimony to the French medical corps’ huge efforts to save lives.

But, like Ms Andretto, many face more surgical operations in the future.

One bullet at the Bataclan shattered an ankle of a pregnant woman in her 30s, ripping upwards through her calf and exploding out through her knee, according to her priest in the Paris suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois.

Her baby appears unharmed, but she will need a lot more treatment on her leg, including a skin graft.

“They think they have saved her leg, but that she will remain disabled,” said Tristan de Salmiech.

In further family trauma, her husband was shot through the stomach but “was incredibly lucky... the bullet didn’t hit any organs,” he added.

Also at the Bataclan, an off-duty police chief from Normandy, a 38-year-old father of two with a black belt in judo, took a bullet in the back that hit his spine. The officer was evacuated to one of the two military hospitals in Paris that, because of their experience with battlefield wounds, took in nearly 20% of the most critically injured casualties.

The list of horrific wounds goes on. And many of the survivors share one thing in common: Shame.

“There were really horrible scenes,” one doctor said. “People told us they had to crush people, walk on them to escape. All that provokes unbearable feelings of shame.”