Your mates give you the best help says 7/7 hero doctor
Dr Peter Holden remembers "everything going salmon-pink" when the London bus bomb exploded at 9.47am.
He spent the next five hours leading a team of 14 GPs treating blast injuries in the courtyard of the nearby British Medical Association in Tavistock Square.
Initially all they had to work with were three first aid kits, curtains torn into strips for bandages, table tops as stretchers, one pair of rubber gloves and a face mask.
Dr Holden, a trained medical incident commander, was on one of his twice-weekly visits to London to represent GPs' rights.
He said: "After the blast, my colleagues told me, Peter, this is your scene, you know what to do'. Those words live with me."
After taking 90 seconds to "sit in a corner and jot my priorities down", Dr Holden set the GPs to work — though they were more used to family medicine than treating blast injuries. Many of the victims had serious head, chest, abdominal and limb injuries and two died in the courtyard.
Dr Holden, who was also at the Hillsborough disaster, said: "Not only were lives saved but long-term injuries were prevented. This was down to basic training and an acceptance of discipline."
Later that day Dr Holden caught a train to Norfolk, where he stayed with friends. "They debriefed me over a meal," he said. "One is a major incident commander who, before I went to bed, told me to write everything down.
"When I got back home I felt really knocked around. But I've found the best counsellors are your mates who've got an idea of what you've been through."
In his regular job, the 54-year-old father of one flies with his local air ambulance in the Peak District and each week witnesses the aftermath of murders and traffic accidents.
He said: "I'm fairly robust about this sort of thing yet over the months after the bombing
I was more irascible and less tolerant to colleagues at my practice. But that got sorted out.
"Every week I walk by the scene of the atrocity where I know I've declared people Priority Four (making a person comfortable as they die), so it's a bit difficult. And we've not had legal closure yet.
"I've managed to keep doing really sharp-end work without any problems. You do learn to block things out and I met the victims on the first anniversary but I've avoided reliving it all."
Dr Holden added: "From nothing we created a casualty clearing station on the forecourt of the BMA, a memorial to the medical dead of the two world wars, and sometimes that chokes me a little bit."
