Emergencies happen anywhere and anytime, and sometimes, medical professionals find themselves in situations where they are the only ones who can help. Is There a Doctor in the House? is a series telling these stories.
A week earlier I’d had a heart surgery and was heading out for a post-op appointment when I saw it: I had a flat tire. It didn’t make sense. The tire was brand new, and there was no puncture. But it was flat.
I swapped out the flat for the spare and went off base to a tire shop. While I was there, my surgeon’s office called and rescheduled my appointment for a couple of hours later. That was lucky because by the time the tire was fixed, I had just enough time to get there.
The hospital is right near I-35 in San Antonio, Texas. I got off the freeway and onto the access road and paused to turn into the parking lot. That’s when I heard an enormous crash.
I saw a big poof of white smoke, and a car barreled off the freeway and came rolling down the embankment.
When the car hit the access road, I saw a woman ejected through the windshield. She bounced and landed in the road about 25 feet in front of me.
I put my car in park, grabbed my face mask and gloves, and started running toward her. But another vehicle — a truck towing a trailer — came from behind to drive around me. The driver didn’t realize what had happened and couldn’t stop in time…
The trailer ran over her.
I didn’t know if anyone could’ve survived that, but I went to her. I saw several other bystanders, but they were frozen in shock. I was praying, dear God, if she’s alive, let me do whatever I need to do to save her life.
It was a horrible scene. This poor lady was in a bloody heap in the middle of the road. Her right arm was twisted up under her neck so tightly, she was choking herself. So, the first thing I did was straighten her arm out to protect her airway.
I started yelling at people, “Call 9-1-1! Run to the hospital! Let them know there’s an accident out here, and I need help!”
The woman had a pulse, but it was super rapid. On first glance, she clearly had multiple fractures and a bad head bleed. With the sheer number of times she’d been injured, I didn’t know what was going on internally, but it was bad. She was gargling on her own blood and spitting it up. She was drowning.
A couple of technicians from the hospital came and brought me a tiny emergency kit. It had a blood pressure cuff and an oral airway. All the vital signs indicated the lady was going into shock. She’d lost a lot of blood on the pavement.
I was able to get the oral airway in. A few minutes later, a fire chief showed up. By now, the traffic had backed up so badly, the emergency vehicles couldn’t get in. But he managed to get there another way and gave me a cervical collar (C collar) and an Ambu bag.
I was hyper-focused on what I could do at that moment and what I needed to do next. Her stats were going down, but she still had a pulse. If she lost the pulse or went into a lethal rhythm, I’d have to start cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). I asked the other people, but nobody else knew CPR, so I wouldn’t have help.
I could tell the lady had a pelvic fracture, and we needed to stabilize her. I directed people how to hold her neck safely and log-roll her flat on the ground. I also needed to put pressure on the back of her head because of all the bleeding. I got people to give me their clothes and tried to do that as I was bagging her.
The windows of her vehicle had all been blown out. I asked somebody to go find her purse with her ID. Then I noticed something …
My heart jumped into my stomach.
A car seat. There was an empty child’s car seat in the back of the car.
I started yelling at everyone, “Look for a baby! Go up and down the embankment and across the road. There might have been a baby in the car!”
But there wasn’t. Thank God. She hadn’t been driving with her child.
At that point, a paramedic came running from behind all the traffic. We did life support together until the ambulance finally arrived.
Emergency medical services got an intravenous line in and used medical anti-shock trousers. Thankfully, I already had the C collar on, and we’d been bagging her, so they could load her very quickly.
I got rid of my bloody gloves. I told a police officer I would come back. And then I went to my doctor’s appointment.
The window at my doctor’s office faced the access road, so the people there had seen all the traffic. They asked me what happened, and I said, “It was me. I saw it happen. I tried to help.” I was a little frazzled.
When I got back to the scene, the police and the fire chief kept thanking me for stopping. Why wouldn’t I stop? It was astounding to realize that they imagined somebody wouldn’t stop in a situation like this.
They told me the lady was alive. She was in the intensive care unit in critical condition, but she had survived. At that moment, I had this overwhelming feeling: God had put me in this exact place at the exact time to save her life.
Looking back, I think about how God ordered my steps. Without the mysterious flat tire, I would’ve gone to the hospital earlier. If my appointment hadn’t been rescheduled, I wouldn’t have been on the access road. All those events brought me there.
Several months later, the woman’s family contacted me and asked if we could meet. I found out more about her injuries. She’d had multiple skull fractures, facial fractures, and a broken jaw. Her upper arm was broken in three places. Her clavicle was broken. She had internal bleeding, a pelvic fracture, and a broken leg. She was 28 years old.
She’d had multiple surgeries, spent 2 months in the ICU, and another 3 months in intensive rehab. But she survived. It was incredible.
We all met up at a McDonald’s. First, her little son — who was the baby I thought might have been in the car — ran up to me and said, “Thank you for saving my mommy’s life.”
Then I turned, and there she was — a beautiful lady looking at me with awe and crying, saying, “It’s me.”
She obviously had gone through a transformation from all the injuries and the medications. She had a little bit of a speech delay, but mentally, she was there. She could walk.