Nurse: I carried 15 South Sudan bodies to the morgue in one day

[PHOTO: COURTESY]

When Medecins Sans Frontieres nurse Michael Shek, 28, from Dumfries, saw images from the South Sudanese civil war, he knew he had to help.

In a plane flying 8,000ft over the plains of South Sudan, I was faced with one of the toughest calls of my nursing career. My patient, a 10-year-old boy and victim of the country’s vicious civil war, was dying from his gunshot wounds before my eyes. His lungs had collapsed because of the air pressure on the plane, and I was terrified he would die before I could get him to hospital in the capital of Juba.