Opinion | From a Doctor, a Reminder to Keep Pushing On

“Yes but … ” he trailed off. Then back again, “Yes! Those guys will fly in anything.”

“You get the Blackhawks. I’ll let our operating room know.”

My office overlooked the street in front of the hospital. After half an hour, I looked down to see the surface of coffee in my mug rippling like in the scene in “Jurassic Park” where the approaching T. rex’s footsteps are detected in puddles of water. Within seconds, there were rhythmic pulsations all around, then a strong thump-thump-thump-thump as the air beat against my window. Outside in the midst of the downpour, trash cans tumbled down the street and pickup trucks were forced down on their shocks. I gazed up to see an Army Blackhawk helicopter, giant in comparison to our standard medical helicopters, hovering steadily over the children’s hospital helipad, rain and fog swirling in all directions. Every part of the office thumped, the heartbeat in my own chest now overpowered.

Events moved quickly after the girl’s arrival. In the pediatric trauma bay, two of the soldiers who brought her through the storm, still in their wet flight gear, worked alongside our nurses. As I came to the bedside, one of the nurses greeted me by name and the younger of the two soldiers for some inexplicable reason immediately snapped to attention.

A vision of my father in his flight suit flashed in my head.

“At ease, soldier,” I said. “I should be saluting you.”

As we packaged the child up and headed off to the elevator up to the operating room I turned back to them. There they stood amid the residual chaos of the trauma room, torn paper packaging and discarded blue gowns strewn about. They watched us roll into the elevator. I locked eyes with the closest soldier. He gave the briefest of nods just before the doors closed. Then he and the chaos of the trauma bay were gone.

The operating room team was ready for the girl, the sterile instruments laid out on the back tables, blue drapes applied after a quick clipping of her hair and lightning-fast wash of her head with sterilizing prep solution. Knife. Retractor. Drill. Scissors to open the dura, the thin leathery covering of the brain, bulging and tight from the underlying blood. Once the brain is exposed it does the work for us, extruding most of the coagulated clot in a matter of seconds. We clean out what is left at the edges and I see the offending vein, torn away from the brain during the accident. We coagulate it and begin to make our way out, step by step, gently repairing all that we had to take apart to get there.

After surgery, she immediately began to stabilize, waking up and even flickering her eyes open, but her recovery took time and her journey was not without cost. She was left with a noticeable weakness on the left side and the slightest slur to her speech, but she was alive. With each follow-up appointment, some hurdle had been overcome. Over time, I would receive updates from her family. She would come to enter and then win a local beauty and talent pageant; be voted Most School Spirit; cheer alongside friends dressed up as the school mascot; and then, one remarkable May day, graduate from high school. Four years later, she would finish college and head to graduate school for a career in social work. All of this chronicled first in clinic visits, then, as the medical reasons to see me faded, in holiday cards and the occasional letter.