PARIS—One bullet tore into Amandine Andretto’s right leg, shattering her tibia. Another hit her in the arm. For three interminable hours, her parents didn’t know if she was among the dozens massacred at the Bataclan concert hall.
Finally, as rescue services rushed her to a triage and treatment center, her mother reached her on the phone.
The 32-year-old lawyer is lucky to be alive, felled by the extremists’ first sprays of gunfire in the Nov. 13 attack but saved by three officers from an elite police unit who dragged her out of the hall during the subsequent hostage-taking.
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 told The Associated Press. “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 comes 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 haunted by what they saw or did to survive France’s worst attack in decades.
For those with smashed spines and other devastating wounds, the months and years ahead could be a daily battle. In many cases, the high-velocity rounds fired at close range and exploding suicide belts packed with shrapnel did lasting damage.
By the French health ministry’s most recent count, on Wednesday, 195 people were still hospitalized, three of them in critical condition and 41 in intensive care. More than 350 people were wounded along with the 129 killed, French officials said.
The Bataclan, where 89 died during a concert by the American band Eagles of Death Metal, was the scene of the worst carnage. There were also attacks at cafes and the national stadium.
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 Andretto, many face more operations in the future.
One bullet at the Bataclan shattered the ankle of a pregnant woman in her thirties, ripping upward through her calf and exploding out through her knee, according to her priest in the Paris suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois, the Rev. Tristan de Salmiech.
Her baby appears unharmed but she will need more treatment on her leg, including a skin graft.
“They think they have saved her leg, but that she will remain disabled,” de Salmiech said.
In further family trauma, her husband was shot through the stomach but “was incredibly lucky ... the bullet didn’t hit any organs,” he added.
The priest would not give the couple’s names, citing privacy concerns.
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 at the Bataclan that hit his spine, according to his town’s mayor, Marc-Antoine Jamet. 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 percent of the most critically injured casualties.
