Princess Diana’s tragic death in a car crash left the world reeling in shock but none so much as the doctor who treated her on that fateful night.
Doctor MonSef Dahman, 56, who was working the night at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital on August 31, 1997, when Princess Diana was rushed into the emergency has spoken out for the first time about the tragedy, saying it “marked him for life.”
In an exclusive interview with The Daily Mail ahead of what would be Diana’s 60th birthday, Dahman gave a minute-by-minute testimony of the night sharing that medics “fought hard, we tried a lot, really an awful lot” to save the people’s princess.
According to his recollection, Diana reached the Hospital at about 2 am after paramedics failed to stabilize her on the scene of the accident. The Princess suffered a cardiac arrest and underwent x-rays that revealed “very serious internal bleeding.”
Dahman and other doctors worked hard to relieve hemorrhaging, performing several procedures, including one that Dahman did himself to “enable her to breathe” since “her heart couldn’t function properly because it was lacking in blood.”
The Princess’s condition deteriorated further and France’s top heart surgeon, Professor Alain Pavie, had to be called in, who determined the cause of profuse hemorrhaging – her upper-left pulmonary vein near the heart was torn.
Pavie worked to suture the tear, however, the effort went in vain as Diana’s heart had stopped and no amount of effort to restart it worked. According to Dahman, medics worked for a full hour to resuscitate her heart before stopping the effort around 4 am.
While it was the end of Diana’s life, it spelled a specially poignant moment in Dahman’s career.
Recalling a particular memory that jolted him at the time and he hadn’t spoken of before, Dahman shared, “When I was treating Diana I was wearing my white sabots [clog-like medical shoes]. And obviously, in that situation, you don’t pay attention to anything but trying to save the patient. It was only the next morning I noticed that my clogs were stained with her blood.”
The realization had hit him when a Frenchman in the hospital stopped him the next morning and said, “‘Ah, your clogs, I am interested in them. I want to buy them from you. They have the sang bleu (blue or royal blood) on them’,” shared Dahman.
Reflecting on his extraordinary experience, Dahman said, “So here we have to consider the philosophy of life. It is a defining element, you can’t escape that. The thought that you have lost an important person for whom you cared, marks you all your life.”
“When it’s a princess and you follow her funeral along with billions of other people, and you had tried to save her, that obviously marks you. It marks you all your life. Because it’s so terrible that this beautiful person had such a tragic end,” he added.
