Bringing It All Back Home by Philip F. Napoli Page B

to save a life.
    The first fatality that stuck in my mind was a kid. We didn’t have many things going on at all at that point. They brought him in on a chopper, and he was put on a gurney outside the operating room while we made sure that everything was prepared. I was supposed to take his history. He looked okay, like he wasn’t really hurting that badly, so we chatted a little bit. I asked him where he was from. He said, “Montana,” and I kind of joked with him, I said, “Oh, I didn’t know they had people over there.” And he laughed and he said, “Well, they had me there,” and all this … And then we brought him in.
    We went to take him off the gurney, and he started to tank. He was turning gray, and at that point I had just readied all the scrub stuff. He had a chest wound and it was a little tiny hole in front, and we moved him and I was starting to shave his chest and the doc came through scrubbed and he said, “We don’t have time, we don’t even have time to gown,” because he recognized [the nature of the wound]. They were starting to put him under, and they’d been alerted to the fact that his vital signs were going to nothing all of a sudden.
    I was kind of a deer in the headlights. They said, “Just throw some Betadine on it and get me scrubbed,” and so I threw on a pair of gloves and helped [the doctor] glove up. We didn’t even have our gowns on at that point. We threw him into the surgical suite, and he started immediately cracking the kid’s chest and just doing a straightforward front-type procedure. We got in there and it was a mess. Blood everywhere.
    I was doing some circulating and working on getting the blood hung at all four extremities, and it was just massive amounts of blood we were putting in. We had this one kid. He was kind of the Black Power kid. He was a strange kid, not at all sociable with anybody, even the other black [operating room] techs, because he held himself above them. He supposedly had a checkered past as far as the clerks knew, and the clerks know everything. So we had this kid who was trained as an operating room tech, but he just didn’t do anything. He kind of stood there. Because I had nothing better to do with him, I said, “Oh, great, he might not participate, but at least he can pump.” So I showed him how to work the pumps that would squeeze the blood in, and I gave him one and I said, “You keep squeezing that until there isn’t any more, and we’ll hang up more and we’ll put that one in your hand.” And we were doing that; we were kind of punching one into his hand, taking it out, putting the next one in.
    And [the tech’s] eyes were just huge above his mask. It was like he was doing this as an automatic thing. I still remember being able to see the veins in his arms as they stood out against the clenching muscle. He was very lean, and as he pumped the things, he was putting a lot of effort into it. At one point I turned my back to get more, and all of a sudden there was this bang. The blood bag had exploded all over the surgeon, all over the walls, all over everything. So we sent him out.
    In the meantime, they were working with the kid from Montana. They were trying to put sutures through his heart. But what had happened was the bullet, and it was a single bullet, had gone in, and it had done what bullets are supposed to do. It spun, it threw off shrapnel and turned his own bone into shrapnel, and it shredded his heart.
    The surgeon was working the guy; the anesthesiologist was working like crazy. We were all just trying to get this kid to live. The surgeon would keep picking out the heart, kind of reaching under it and trying to suture it, and it was shredded. The suture would come up bloody.
    And the surgeon just kind of gave up. I remember him kind of laying the suture right on the chest. It was like, what can you do? The guy’s just had