The pagers of emergency room staff at Hennepin Healthcare, in downtown Minneapolis, buzzed yet again — this time carrying especially dire news. About 20 victims needed urgent medical care after a shooting at Annunciation Church about 6 miles away.
The hospital had already taken in patients from another mass shooting in south Minneapolis less than 24 hours earlier that left one dead and six others injured.
"Taking care of one child that’s injured is difficult,” Dr. Jon Gayken, a Hennepin Healthcare trauma surgeon, told reporters on Aug. 28, as nine people, mostly children, remained hospitalized. “Eight of them is nearly impossible, but it happened yesterday.”
Two children died and 18 others were injured when a shooter opened fire through the church windows as schoolchildren and parishioners prayed. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara told reporters children had active shooter training drills to take cover and help others, which may have prevented more deaths.
Many of the wounded children would be rushed to the hospital, an adult and children's trauma 1 center that's trained to handle trauma patients 24/7 and houses the state's largest emergency department. When patients arrived to Hennepin Healthcare, additional staff were moved to treat shooting victims.
Hospital workers described a frantic race-against-time as workers rallied and sacrificed to help victims.
Gayken recounted a child who was scared and alone and about to undergo a CT scan, which looks at damage inside the body. A nurse manager from another unit accompanied the child in the scanner, wearing lead protection to block the radiation used by the medical imaging technology, he said. The nurse held the child's hand to comfort her.
It isn't as if emergency rooms are empty when mass shooting victims arrive, said Dr. Thomas Scalea, physician-in-chief at the University of Maryland R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center. Officials need to prepare for an unpredictable influx of people from a mass shooting.
"It's terrible, it's nuts, but it is the world in which we live," he told USA TODAY. "Now, nobody says, 'Is this going to happen again?' Everybody just says, 'When?'"
Life-saving treatment gets counted by minutes, even seconds, to stop bleeding and help victims breathe, said Dr. Aaron Robinson, assistant medical director at Hennepin EMS and an emergency medicine doctor at Hennepin Healthcare.
“Every minute that the trauma patient spends on scene increases their chances of not having a good outcome and possibly dying,” Robinson said.
“Those swift actions undoubtedly saved the lives of many of those children," he said.
First responders had to quickly triage whether people were conscious, and whether they had gunshot wounds to the head or upper body, defined as red patients, according to Marty Shear, senior director of Hennepin EMS. Others with less serious wounds were yellow patients. And a few yellow patients would be loaded with a red patient in the ambulance.
Other children with less critical wounds were sent to the local Children’s Minnesota Hospital, Shear said.
As of Aug. 28, six people, five of whom are children, are described as in “satisfactory condition,” according to Thomas Clemen, CEO of Hennepin Healthcare. Two patients, an adult and child, are in serious condition, while another child is in critical condition.
In addition to the importance of how hospitals respond in treating patients, Dr. Deborah Kuhls, chief of trauma at the University Medical Center in Las Vegas and the UNLV School of Medicine, said there is a significant emotional response ahead with senseless, yet intentional, killings. Pointing to her work treating people in the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting that killed 58 people and wounded hundreds more, the toll is not only on people injured, but also health professionals and first responders.
“Hopefully they’ll get better and they’ll be able to recover from their injuries,” she said. “But it goes on for a very, very long time.”
Meanwhile, the response to gunshot wound victims requires significant amounts of blood to replace that which they have lost. There is also a critical blood shortage in Minnesota, Robinson said, adding there is just a few days left of blood supply.
“We’re still using blood,” Gayken said. "It’s not just the morning after. It’s ongoing.”
Eduardo Cuevas is based in New York City. Reach him by email at [email protected] or on Signal at emcuevas.01.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Minneapolis hospitals left reeling after shooting victims flooded ERs
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