Issue link: https://tmcpulse.uberflip.com/i/1079661
t m c » p u l s e | f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 9 23 Then, he caught a glimpse of a helicopter. A veteran of the Houston Police Department, Barnes knew Life Flight was his best chance at survival. He turned to the nurse beside him and mustered the strength to speak. "Get me on that [expletive] helicopter, or I'm going to die," he said. * * * Word of a school shooting in Santa Fe first made its way to the trauma center at The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB Health) when an alert was pulsed out over Emergency Medical Services (EMS) dis- patch radio. Abby Anderson, a registered nurse working that morning, said that after one of her coworkers got a call from a student running away from the high school on foot, she and the trauma team began to prepare for victims. This is real, Anderson remembered thinking. This is happening. Meanwhile, up in the air with helicopter blades whirring above him, an unconscious Barnes had flatlined—his heart stopped beating. The nurses on Memorial Hermann Life Flight pumped two units of blood into his body and he was intubated and fitted with a LUCAS device, a mechanical chest compression system that pulsed his heart with sys- tematic accuracy, automating its beat. By 8:31 a.m., less than an hour after he had been shot, Barnes was lying in exam room 102 at UTMB. He woke briefly for about 30 seconds, and although he couldn't open his eyes or even wiggle a finger, he could hear the trauma team calling out orders. He was lulled back into uncon- sciousness with the assurance that people were trying to save his life. * * * * Trauma teams are charged with preserving life and keeping death at bay. Like school resource officers, police and EMS personnel, they are a first line of defense in a medical crisis. A typical UTMB trauma team is made up of a physician faculty member, three residents and emergency room nurses. The team worked on Barnes for 50 minutes in the emergency room; they inserted a catheter, took an X-ray at the bedside to peer inside his ruptured arm, and packed the wound with QuickClot combat gauze—a fabric impreg- nated with a clay derivative that clots blood. A nurse initi- ated a massive transfusion protocol and, shortly thereafter, coolers of blood and plasma and platelets arrived from the local blood bank. They filled Barnes with five units of packed red blood cells, desperately hoping to replenish all that he had lost. ➟ Barnes visits exam room 102 at The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, where he was first treated by the trauma team after arriving in the emergency room. People are getting shot in front of me. And very quickly, everybody either exits out the door or goes past me. — JOHN BARNES Former school resource officer at Santa Fe High School