dent into the hospital, we were told that he'd just come from a luncheon. For an anesthesiologist, that's important information. It means that the patient has a stomach full or half-full of food. "When a patient goes into emergency surgery on a full stomach, he can vomit during the induction of anesthesia. The food he has eaten, along with the stomach acid, can back up through his esophagus.
Sometimes the acid gets into his windpipe, the trachea, and it runs down into his lungs. "The stomach acid is so strong, it burns the lung lining so badly that the patient can't breathe. A considerable number of emergency patients die that way. In President Reagan's case, a colleague pressed down on his windpipe to prevent vomiting until I could insert a tube into his trachea. This allowed him to breathe with no danger of acid backing up into his windpipe and into his lungs.
"When the President came into our emergency room, he kept saying, 'I can't breathe. I can't I immediately put him on oxygen. Dr. Giordano, head of our trauma team, placed a tube into his chest, and out drained 1300cc. of blood -about a quart and a half.
Reagan was bleeding heavily and needed a quick transfusion." Then, in the operating room, Morales anesthetized the President and Giordano made a small incision under his navel, inserted a tube into the abdominal cavity, and flushed it with a fluid. Upon being withdrawn, the fluid appeared free of blood cells -a sign that no abdominal organ was injured. Giordano had the fluid rushed to the lab for corroboration. He remembers thinking to himself when the lab confirmed the good news, "The President's a lucky Dr. Aaron, who retired from the Navy in 1979 to join the George Washington staff, and his assistant Dr.
Cheyney didn't believe at first that the President was all that lucky. After making sure that neither his heart nor aorta had been damaged, they couldn't find the bullet that they'd seen on the X-ray. Aaron ordered another -a side view according to him, "the bullet was lodged about an inch away from both the President's heart and aorta." "The darn bullet," Dr. Cheyney recalls, "was flattened out to about the size of a dime. It must PARADE MAY 31.
1981 13 have gone through the President's limousine at some point before it entered his body. God sure smiled on In retrospect, the accounts of the above physicians may vary from the overwhelmingly optimistic reports that Dr. Dennis O'Leary, the hospital spokesman, gave the news media on March 30. These accounts are, of course, based somewhat on conjecture. But to report that a 70-year-old man who was nearly in shock upon entering the hospital after being shot in the chest-resulting in one collapsed lung, difficulty in breathing and a loss of bloodwas "never in any serious danger" may be gilding the lily a bit.
"What we had working for us," says Dr. Edelstein, "was luck, time, experience and preparation. "Our hospital has a phone line directly linked to the White House switchboard. That was the idea of Dr. Paul Lukash, the previous White House physician, just in case Amy Carter skinned her knee or something.
I'm just The first phone message we got was, 'Presidential motorcade en route. Agents have been By the time the President got to the hospital, about two minutes later, our trauma staff was pretty well assembled. "None of us knew the President was shot until the staff cut away his clothes. The emergency room was immediately cleared. The first question the Secret Service asked was, 'Where are your We had no windows in our immediate area.
"I think we had Reagan in the operating room in less than half an hour after he was shot, all prepped and ready to go. That's good time. We banned newspersons from the hospital, and the Secret Service gave out identification pins to the hospital personnel working on the case. "The President came out of his anesthesia in the recovery room in remarkably quick time. The endotrachial tube was still in his throat, and he couldn't talk, so he motioned for a clipboard.
His first message was the old W.C. Fields gag, 'All in all, I'd rather be in His second was the Winston Churchill quote, 'There's no more exhilarating feeling than being shot at without He spelled 'exhilarating' incorrectly the first time, then corrected it. That's how alert he was." -Satistaction Guaranteed' Mat Coupon Today OLD VILLAGE SHOP, Dept. VM-3435, 340 Poplar Street, Hanover, Pa. 17331 Please rush prs.
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