A SURGEON from Oxford says the 500 operations he carried out in three weeks on Haiti earthquake victims were a “drop in the ocean”.

Prof Chris Bulstrode, an orthopaedic specialist in the accident and emergency department of the John Radcliffe Hospital, in Headington, spent three weeks in the earthquake zone.

He returned home to Stanton St John early yesterday from the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, where he worked alongside a team of volunteers from the French charity Doctors of the World (Médecins du Monde).

More than 200,000 people died in the earthquake and thousands more were left homeless.

The father of three performed 500 operations, working with another surgeon, but admitted their efforts barely scratched the surface in terms of the number of people needing specialist treatment.

Prof Bulstrode, 59, said: “I was proud to be asked but we were just a drop in the ocean.

“We worked from the moment the light came up until it got dark, with head torches just in a room as our operating theatre.

“The injuries were just horrendous – amputations and crushed limbs – and by the time we arrived everything was infected.”

Haiti was his first experience of helping victims of a natural disaster.

He said: “They were the most beautiful, lovely people having a very tough time.

“When we treated somebody and told them they could go home, they looked at us blankly and said they had nowhere to go.

“One little old lady had come in with her foot crushed and she had lost her husband, her children, her brothers and sisters. She was the last person left in that family.”

Prof Bulstrode was the only British member of the team and had to brush up on his schoolboy French to speak to colleagues, as well as trying to get to grips with the local Creole dialect.

He admitted he found it difficult not to get emotionally involved, particularly in the case of a young man with gangrene in his legs, which the doctors had spent most of the three weeks trying to save.

Shortly before he left, Prof Bulstrode was forced to admit defeat and explain to the man’s 16-year-old cousin exactly why it was necessary to amputate.

He said: “It just stops you in your tracks when you realise there’s nothing, no social services to get in touch with, no families.

“I’m not very good at closing off and all of us occasionally got caught completely on the hop and had to turn away for a moment and take a few deep breaths.”

Doctors of the World is now planning to work with Handicap International to start workshops to create affordable artificial limbs, which could also provide work for some of the people hurt in the disaster.

Prof Bulstrode said he anticipated his skills would be called on again and planned to do some training on artificial limbs but said he needed some time to recover from his experiences over the past three weeks.

Last year, Prof Bulstrode visited the Gaza Strip with Doctors of the World to treat Palestinians who had been injured during a Israeli military operation.

In 2008 he served a tour of duty in Afghanistan as a Territorial Army doctor.