Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan by Wilber Del Quentin

Author:Wilber, Del Quentin [Wilber, Del Quentin]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2011-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

DOCTORS GIORDANO, GENS, and Price watched saline solution drain from the catheter into a small plastic container. The liquid was crystal clear. The belly tap seemed to confirm that Reagan did not have an abdominal injury, but to be certain they sent the fluid to the laboratory for testing. Now Giordano pulled out the tube, stitched together the various layers of tissue, and allowed Gens to suture the skin. As Gens tied up the small incision with nylon thread, the young doctor was struck—for the first time—by the magnitude of the occasion. He was closing the abdominal incision of the president of the United States.

Gens lifted his head and surveyed the crowded operating room. He’d never seen such a congested OR: it was filled with doctors, nurses, technicians, and at least half a dozen Secret Service agents. Yet except for a cough or two and the beeping of the heart monitor and the whoosh of the respirator, it was quiet and still, almost peaceful.

“Does anybody know what’s going on out there?” Gens asked.

The medical team was so focused on their patient that no one had thought to find out what was happening outside the hospital—whether other people had been wounded or killed, whether assassins had targeted others in the capital, whether the world was at war. They knew nothing. And if the Secret Service agents knew, they didn’t respond to Gens’s query.

About half an hour after the belly tap procedure began, Gens sewed up the final bit of skin; then he extracted the chest tube so Aaron and his team could begin their surgery. After pulling out the tube, Gens checked the Pleur-evac container, which had filled with 325 milliliters of fluid in the past hour or so—a significant amount of additional blood and further evidence that the chest tube had not stanched the hemorrhaging. As of 4:30 p.m., the president’s total blood loss was 2.6 liters, about 40 percent of his blood volume. Since his arrival in the hospital, doctors had been keeping pace with Reagan’s bleeding by pumping donated blood and fluids into his system. So far, the tactic was working and his vital signs were stable. But this compensatory approach couldn’t continue forever. They would have to stop the bleeding surgically.

After finishing the belly tap, Giordano and Gens stepped out of the OR to brief the first lady in a small office near the operating rooms. The office was so cramped they sat knee to knee. Giordano explained the significance of the fact that the president’s abdomen was clear of blood. The next step, he told Mrs. Reagan, was for Ben Aaron to perform chest surgery and stop the bleeding. The surgery would last a couple of hours, but they expected the president to emerge from it in fine shape.

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