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The Golden Hour
| Article
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18684 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1991 |
2,795 Words |
| Author
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Sherry Von Ohlsen
Sherry Von Ohlsen writes from her base in Sparta, New Jersey. |
When a massive natural disaster strikes--a killer flood, say, in Bangladesh--people everywhere are struck by the fragility of life. Medical disasters have much the same effect but in microcosm: They send shivers through the flight rooms of trauma hospitals across the country.
One of these flight rooms is on the fourteenth floor of Hahnemann University Hospital in Philadelphia, where a pilot, registered nurse, and paramedic hustle to cull the first minutes of what has come to be known as the "golden hour." Coined by physician R. Adams Cowley, the golden hour refers to the first hour after trauma, the hour that determines whether a victim lives or dies. It's an hour whose minutes could be siphoned away by miscommunication, mistaken direction, even a street ambulance. The flight team hustles to save those minutes and then hand them over to the trauma team at the hospital, which will work to resuscitate a life.
It's a gray Philadelphia morning, a Monday that could see rain, when I enter Hahnemann University Hospital to meet Hal Spatz, director of the MedEvac program that serves both Hahnemann University Hospital and Lehigh Valley Hospital. The two hospitals each have a helicopter, MedEvac I for Lehigh and MedEvac II for Hahnemann. "The helicopter is here, ready to go," Spatz tells me. "It's cocked and loaded, waiting for someone to pull the trigger."
The trigger has been pulled a lot; during the last nine years, 8,178 missions have been flown by the two MedEvac teams that serve the hospitals. In 1990, MedEvac II handled 600 cases.
MedEvac II has already had two flights this morning: one to harvest a heart for a transplant operation, another to transport a three-week-old unconscious infant from one hospital to another.
As I step inside the flight room on the fourteenth floor to meet the flight crew, I sense tension in the air. It could be that the crew is ambivalent about being interviewed by a writer. More likely, they're still thinking about the unconscious infant they have just finished transporting. The introductions go smoothly.
Steve Uzelac is the pilot. He's wearing aviator glasses and an army issue flight suit. He fiddles with the computer. Cathi McNulty is a perky, soft-spoken blond RN. She's charting this morning's calls. How comforting she must sound to a terror-stricken trauma patient. Scott Burk is the paramedic. He's talkative
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