Back in the Game by Steve Scalise

Author:Steve Scalise [Scalise, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2018-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

At around 8:20 AM, Dr. Sava received a text message from his partner, Dr. Anthony Shiflett: “He looks bad, heading to the OR.”

Back up in the trauma bay, as Susan Kennedy coordinated a phalanx of men and women sprinting down the hall with me on the gurney, Sava hustled to the operating room to meet them. He scrubbed in, as a mass of people converged from different parts of the hospital.

Sava took one look and thought I was at imminent risk of death. I didn’t have a blood pressure anyone could measure. Brad’s tourniquet had already been removed, but Sava could tell right away that without that tourniquet, I would have been dead before getting to the hospital. Brad had given me a chance. It wasn’t a great chance. But it was a chance.

Sava decided to suspend the “role clarity” introductions. There wasn’t time.

They were a group of people with overlapping expertise ready to start a complex operation with many moving parts, the risk of a mix-up was high, and with my condition so dire, even just one mistake would probably mean the difference between life and death. Still, Sava decided he had no choice but to hope that the “shared communication model” would prevail and bring down the chance of mistakes, just because they’d rehearsed it for so long, and in the interest of speed, he’d take on the task of clarifying roles himself.

He decided he didn’t want to think about getting blood into me and wanted to make sure no one mistakenly deferred to him about it. “Anesthesia,” he said, “you’re in charge of fluids and blood. I’m not even going to think about that.”

“Okay. Anesthesia’s in charge of fluids and blood.”

He wanted to make sure they didn’t keep silent about blood pressure; it’d be important for him to know how I was doing. “Let me know if anything changes up there, and I’ll do the same from here.”

He wanted to make sure the most junior person around the table wouldn’t be intimidated if he or she saw a problem no one else saw, so Sava immediately broke down the barriers of hierarchy. He looked at the young doctor who’d come running into the room with a hand on the bullet wound and said, “I want you to keep holding that. If you notice anything, if it seems like it’s bleeding around your fingers, anything, please feel free to let me know.”

The junior members had all just been reminded their input was invited.

He told everyone around the table, “I’ll keep you informed about whether or not we’re seeing new bleeding and how things are coming along.”

And then he got to work.

Sava made a big incision down the middle of my abdomen, inserted metal retractors to pull edges away, and opened me up. He started packing the opening full of cotton sponges to absorb some of the blood and to clear his view.

He’d effectively just popped the hood. What he saw was bad. The bullet fragments had covered a

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