03/31/2007Amazing Medicine

Lisa Flynn, MD, RVT, FACS

March/April 2007 Issue of Signature Magazine
Written by Nancy Nall Derringer
Photos by Daniel Lippitt

The worst day in her overseas medical experience, says Lisa Flynn, M.D., was the day a major in the Army Reserves, Flynn, a City of Grosse Pointe resident, was assigned to the oncenotorious detention center in Abu Ghraib, nearly two years after the scandal that made the Iraqi prison’s name a household word. Technically, her mission was to care for Iraqi detainees, but in a war zone, she cared for everyone, from Iraqi babies to – one awful day – a young Marine who'd stepped on a homemade bomb.

These booby traps are a favorite tool of the Iraqi insurgency, she says, and the hit on the Marine was fatal. "He'd bled out in the field," Flynn says. "“He was DOA when he got to us." But the Marine's buddies couldn't handle that, not yet, and they gathered around the room, expecting to see some treatment.

Flynn gave the orders, and she and her crew performed CPR. They worked on him for half an hour, until the soldiers watching could accept that there was nothing to be done for their comrade, and he could be pronounced dead.

Flynn was, on that day, about as far from Grosse Pointe and a comfortable practice in vascular surgery as it was possible to be.

But the front lines are where the 39-year-old believes she can best serve her country, using the skills she honed during her training at Detroit Receiving Hospital during the 1990s drug wars. It was there, 10 years ago, that Flynn says she decided to join the Reserves. She and the other doctors joked morbidly that their experience repairing gunshot wounds would probably suit them well on a more traditional battlefield.

"And I'm just a patriotic person," she adds.

Flynn thought her service would not be much more demanding than one weekend a month, two weeks a year and an occasional deployment to a theater similar to that of the first Persian Gulf War. Her first rotation in Iraq began in March 2003, when she landed in Kuwait not long after the United States invaded. The hitch was 90 days, in which time she and her forward surgical team saw 11 cases.

Flynn was home by July 2003. She was not supposed to be called again for at least two years, she says, and that call came right on schedule, in August 2005. By then, Iraq was a very different place.

The Iraqi insurgency had taken hold and showed no signs of weakening. Flynn says she wore body armor to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. The perimeter around the detention facility regularly rang with explosions. Flynn and her team cared for detainees, civilians, translators – anyone who needed a doctor.

"There was one kid, 16 years old," she recalls. He was blind and not mentally developed enough to make his own decisions. "The Marines caught him setting up a [homemade bomb], which someone had set him up for. They shot him, which you can't fault them for. But he didn’t know what he was doing." Flynn says he pulled through. Others didn't.

"It was very stressful and very emotional," Flynn says. Young soldiers would rage at having to treat the enemy, and she'd have to calm them down: "We're medical people. This is what we do. We do whatever it takes to save our patients."

Flynn finished her 90-day assignment, but her replacement, a heart surgeon, wasn't confident of his general-surgery skills, so she stayed another three months to assist. For six months she lived without running water,using portable toilets. Soldiers found and detonated an average of 22 homemade bombs each day outside the perimeter of their 280-acre facility. Flynn says she performed surgery in a single operating room with two beds; sometimes other surgeons worked next to her at the same time.

"It's nothing like here," Flynn says of Bon Secours Cottage and St. John hospitals, where she is on staff. She says her partners carry her share of the workload when she's serving her country. But while her office door is decorated with flags and an Army bumper sticker, "no one says anything about the politics of the war to me. I’m a doctor. I'm not someone making decisions about how we fight."

Now that she's home again, Flynn, who’s single, says she's filling her time with the busy, but considerably less dangerous, duty of American medical practice. She recently adopted a Lab/shar-pei mix, Heidi, to spoil, and says she just tries to keep everything in perspective. She returns, again, to that Marine.

"We're pumping his chest, and he’s got two grenades in his pockets and a loaded weapon on his belt," Flynn says. "And here I was feeling bad because I had to use a Porta-John."

<< Back to List