Pam Cluxton: She just kept saying, I don't think I can breathe, I don't think I can breathe. When I heard the click and I turned around, he was sitting with the bow and he was just dumbstruck like he was in a fugue state. He couldn't even move. He couldn't even speak. He was just sitting there staring.
Dr. Ekeh: So we received a notification that we were going to be receiving a patient that had a penetrating injury to the chest, basically an arrow to the chest.
Pam Cluxton: Even though I am a nurse, I knew at that point there was nothing I could do. I couldn't remove the arrow, it had to stay where it was. She wasn't bleeding. So I didn't ... you know, there wasn't any bleeding to stop. I wanted her to get down. I wanted her to sit down, but she absolutely refused, she just stood there. She wouldn't sit down. So I knew I just needed them to get there as soon as they could get there because there was nothing that I could do.
They had the CareFlight in the air on the way. So I don't think it takes over 10, 11 minutes maybe for them to get there. So they had to probably just soon after she arrived, within five minutes, I would say they probably landed.
Jennifer Schueler: That patient needed care at a level one trauma center, and that is something that Highland District is not the level one trauma center. And they made the referral so that we could fly that patient up to the level one trauma center to get her the care that she needed.
Dr. Ekeh: She came to the emergency room and, it was quite an interesting sight. Something that, even after many years of doing this, I don't see often. She basically had an arrow. This is from a cross bow entering her chest on the right side. You could actually pop-hit the tip of it on the left side of the chest. So it had gone across the entire chest.
So it had unfortunately not only gone through her chest, it had gone through her heart, and basically the tip of it was on the other side of the chest, actually in the abdomen. We knew right there what we're dealing with, and she needed to go to surgery, so we took her to go our upstairs, because this was involving the heart, and there was a possibility that we could need to have gone on bypass. We right away called our cardiac surgeon here, Dr. Zaman.
Dr. Zaman: I think before I kind of opened the chest and looked at what I had to deal with, my biggest concern was how to repair the injury, because on the CT scan there was a suggestion that, the arrow actually could have gone through the muscle, and created a little tunnel in the muscle itself. And my concern was that when we pull it out, the heart would just completely fall apart.
And if that would have happened there's no way we could have fixed it. But once we got in, and be controlled the situation with heart–lung machine, we were actually able to pull the arrow out, and there was two holes, one kind of on the right side of the heart, one in the back. And then we had the ability to kind of you know, close.
But what I was working on, in may concern was will this repair hold, because one's the heart starts to beat, it fills up with blood, sometimes these holes can start bleeding again. So obviously we did whatever we needed to do. Make sure that the repair was as secure as possible.
Jennifer Schueler: I would say that the availability of CareFlight, that has bases strategically located to certain rural areas that will allow rapid and quick transport to a level one trauma center. Gives the patients in the rural areas the advantage of being treated at a level one trauma center and the services that we can provide.
Dr. Ekeh: We look at our role as a level one trauma center, not just in isolation, but as part of a larger system that starts right on the field with the EMS who would appropriately take certain patients to the closest hospital. And those physicians at that hospital, once they recognize that it is something beyond their regular capabilities would make that call to us, and we do everything to facilitate that speedy transfer whether by CareFlight or by other means necessary to get the patient to us as quickly as possible.
Dr. Zaman: She would not have made it, had she not come here. And I believe that wholeheartedly, she would never have made it. Because when you get here, you know, you have the staff ready to do what they need to do to take care of something like that. They're ready. They're willing, and even if it's something new to them, like Kelly's was her case, they go right at it. As soon as you hit ... as soon as you hit the doors here, boom. They're on top of it.
Kelly Boucher: They were surprised at how well that I recovered, and I didn't really know where I got hit in all my organs until after I did the visit when he took my staples out of my stomach.
Dr. Zaman: It's amazing. You know, I'm a cardiac surgeon and I'm sure that most doctors feel this way, but, these people they come in to office. It's very rewarding. It's a very rewarding profession for me to help these patients who have basically like been very close to not surviving, and seeing them happy, healthy and how grateful they are to us, that's why we do what you do.
Dr. Ekeh: I think for me, this case just highlights how we're able to take care of complex, and unusual trauma at our level one trauma center here, and also the collaboration that starts from the field and EMS referring hospitals, to continuing too inside the hospital with the emergency department, and all the personnel there, and other specialties, kind of thoracic in this case.
And working seamlessly together to get great results for patients. So I think that is a great highlight. This what this case exemplifies.
Pam Cluxton: The surgeons here, the people here, they brought her through it, and you would never know today that she had been through that trauma or through all those surgeries or anything. She's back to the good old Kelly, we all knew. And Dalton still has his mother.
Kelly Boucher: So I'm grateful that I had a team that worked on me, and removed it and sewed me up. If it weren't for all these people, I wouldn't...my son would have no mother right now. I don't even know where he would be.
