“You are just on automatic,” Dr. Bowman explains. “Actually, after I dealt with the first two victims pretty quickly, Giffords taking the most time to just get her situated, I did stop and look out in the parking lot just to see if anybody was aiming anything at us.”
The most difficult part of field triage, Dr. Bowman says, is staying calm, organized, and “not losing it emotionally.” In fact, he ushered some shell-shocked bystanders away from the scene. “Some people will step right forward and say, ‘Can I help? I know CPR.’ Other people will just stand there and scream.”
Even tougher, he says, was watching his wife try to save the life of U.S. District Judge John Roll (see “Remembering the Dead,” above). “I finally had to go to my wife, pull her off of him, and say, ‘Honey, he’s gone. I need help with this lady who has been shot in the chest laying in the street,’ ” Dr. Bowman says. “Pulling them away is pretty hard. … It was harder for her and the bystanders, because they were the ones getting right down close with the patient, talking to them, telling patients to ‘keep looking at me.’ That is a very close bond that develops. Field triage, you just keep moving.”
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Human Spirit, Cooperation, and Hope
One month after the shooting, Rep. Giffords was moving, talking, thinking, and recuperating at what her doctors at Houston’s TIRR Hermann Memorial deemed “lightning speed.” For Dr. Bowman, such news brings more than a sigh of relief.
“In truth, when I was first with her, she wasn’t responding,” he says. “She was breathing, although with a compromised airway. We got that straightened away and she had a good pulse. Daniel Hernandez, the young man with her, had some nursing training and was comfortable being with her.
“It was amazing to me, the second or third time down the line, just to look over to this guy, and he was watching for me, and he would nod and say, ‘We’re OK. She’s breathing, pulse is OK.’ I didn’t have to go back, and the third time down he said, ‘She’s moving, she’s squeezing my hand.’ ”
It was at that moment that Dr. Bowman felt the congresswoman, in spite of her severe head trauma, had a fighting chance. Others miracles were happening all around him. Each memory ceases to amaze the veteran physician.
“People who were injured holding somebody’s head in their lap because they were hit in the head and this person was hit in the chest,” he says. “It gives you hope for the human race. Those people, to me, were the heroes.”
Looking back, Dr. Bowman says, he’s played back the moment in his mind more than a few times, wondering if he did the right thing for every victim. He wonders how much he and his wife, the other doctors at the scene, and the bystanders really helped. Then, after a brief moment, he has the answer.
“It really took two weeks to really say that, when all the victims that had expired were dead at the scene, and everybody that got taken away made it and out of the hospital, it sunk in that we had made the right decisions,” he says. “Nobody died on the operating table because we didn’t pick up the gunshot wound to the back. It took two weeks to realize we did the right thing.”
Some of those answers will take many more weeks. Rep. Giffords, although she is on a positive path, still has a long road to a full recovery, and doctors are making no promises. “I don’t know how far she will make it or how long it is going to take, but there are some miracles out there,” Dr. Bowman says.