Surgeon MonSef Dahman, the surgeon who tried to save Princess Diana’s life, talked about what happened that night when Princess Diana was involved in the car crash which took her life.
“The thought that you have lost an important person, for whom you cared personally, marks you for life,” Dahman shared.
Dahman was at the hospital that night, because his wife was pregnant. He shared that he was supposed to be on holiday, but since his wife’s due day was close, they chose to stay in Paris instead of being away on holiday.
Dahman stated that the day started easy than most of his days at the hospital. Things changed dramatically at 2 a.m.
At 12:23 a.m., the car Princess Diana was in crashed in a tunnel. She suffered cardiac arrest while she was on her way to the hospital. It was 02:06 a.m. when Diana was at the hospital.
“I was resting in the duty room when I got a call from Bruno Riou, the senior duty anaesthetist, telling me to go to the emergency room,” Dahman said.
“I wasn’t told it was Lady Diana, but [only] that there’d been a serious accident involving a young woman.”
He was told that the person in the room was Princess Diana, and then Dahman realized the situation. “It only took that moment for all this unusual activity to become clear to me,” Dahman said.
“For any doctor, any surgeon, it is of very great importance to be faced with such a young woman who is in this condition. But ofcourse even more so if she is a princess.”
After 15 minutes passed since Diana arrived at the hospital, and she again suffered another cardiac arrest. “We tried electric shocks, several times and, as I had done in the emergency room, cardiac massage,” Dahman said. “Professor Riou had administered adrenaline. But we could not get her heart beating again.”
“We fought hard, we tried a lot, really an awful lot,” Dahman continued. “Frankly, when you are working in those conditions, you don’t notice the passage of time. The only thing that is important is that we do everything possible for this young woman.”
“We could not save her. And that affected us very much.”
MonSef Dahman shared that he is thinking about that day in 1997. He stated that he watched the funeral from TV, just like any other person on the planet.
“I don’t go back to it all the time because a lot of years have gone by,” Dahman said. “But every time a new book [about Diana’s death] has come out [in France], it has been sent to me. So I have a collection of such books, unfortunately.”
Royal expert Richard Kay was the last person Princess Diana spoke with before she passed away. “I spoke to her that night. The police said that the last call she made was to me,” Kay explained.
And a year after Diana’s passing, royal author Howard Hogson had talked about the late princess. “She was well aware that the Queen had the constitutional right and authority under common law to take control of both boys’ care and education,” Hodgson shared.
“As such she could become the boys’ guardian or even appoint one: this would probably be their father and that might lead to Diana’s exclusion if she finally burned all her bridges with the Royal Family.”
“She was desperate to try and make a fresh start and do something different, to explore a different kind of Royalty,” Richard Kay shared about Diana’s actions after her split with then-Prince Charles. “And she wanted to come back and see her boys.”
On the 20th anniversary of Diana’s passing, in 2017, her children Prince Harry and Prince William talked about the memory of their mother. “When everybody says ‘she was funny, give us an example’. All I can hear is her laugh,” Prince Harry said.
“She was one of the naughtiest parents, she’d come and watch us play football and smuggle sweet into her socks, literally walking back from a football match and having five packages of [candy]. And just, the whole shirt was full with sweets.”
“We felt incredibly loved by her, and I’m very grateful that the love still feels there,” Prince William commented. “It feels like a good time to remember her and hopefully provide a different side.”
What do you think? Let us know.