A Grisly Day

Do you ever wonder if all your life’s training was to prepare you for one moment? In retrospect, Saturday seems like that day.

The setting is our 30-bed mission hospital with a two and a half bed Emergency room, running on generator power since the electricity was out to our section of the country, with one doctor, one resident, one intern and two nurses on duty on a Saturday morning. At 10:15 AM a bus crashes and overturns on the road winding down from the Andes towards the Amazon, about a 25-minute drive from Vozandes-Shell.

Six are dead on the scene. Bystanders begin loading other victims into pickup trucks, cars and eventually ambulances to be transported down the road to our hospital or up the road to others.

Broken and bloody body after body came through the door, 23 in total. It resembled a scene from a war movie. Four with severe head injuries were intubated and placed on our three ventilators. Short one ventilator, a patient’s mother-in-law was quickly briefed on how to keep her daughter-in-law alive by squeezing the ambu bag and ventilating her while we moved on to other patients. She kept it up for one hour before she was transferred. A call for help to the nearest hospital brought five Ecuadorian doctors who could not see patients in their own hospital due to the power outage.

One scene still plays in my head. A 22-year old Korean-American girl wandering through the door with the entire right side of her face from her nose to her ear hanging off, exposing her skull, the skin held up by her right hand, obviously in shock mumbling, “Does anyone speak English, does anyone speak English?” A missionary took her off for treatment.

In all, two patients died, six critical head injury patients were transferred for CT evaluation, several underwent major surgery and the remainder had lacerations sutured and fractures splinted or casted. Missionaries and staff donated blood that was immediately transfused into patients - the closest blood bank was unable to process blood due to the power outage. The following day we airlifted seven more patients (paid for by the local ministry of health) to other hospitals for further treatment.

The Korean-American girl was in such shock she could only worry about her missing backpack that contained all her research data for her graduate thesis. A very determined missionary traveled to two separate towns, three different police stations and the regional transportation office in search of the backpack. She even searched the wreckage of the entire bus and found nothing. Eventually, in a locked storeroom in a transportation office in a town two hours away she found the backpack, still sealed, with all the girl’s research data, cash, credit cards and passport.

We ended the week with a Thanksgiving service to God, thanking him for his amazing provision that day: wisdom for quick decisions, peace in a chaotic environment, volunteer staff to help care for the wounded, a hospital that provides care first without regard to who is paying the bill and for the lives saved and changed that day.