Josh's Story

I first heard about Josh, of course I didn’t know he was Josh at the time, was a level I trauma activation.

I got home and he wasn’t home, I turned my phone on and I had a voice mail from the Sheriff’s department saying that he was at Wayne Hospital in Greenville.

The CareFlight lady that was gonna take care of him came up to us right away, which we knew nothing. She said, “We’re gonna be CareFlighting your husband to Miami Valley.” And we’re like….’cause at the time we didn’t think anything was too serious.

Based on the report I get, will help me make a decision about what level of things to be ready for when the patient hits the door. And I’d rather be have everything ready to go and find out this guy’s coming in and he looks perfectly fine, ‘cause then I can send everybody away. The problem is if the patient shows up at the door and you don’t have all that stuff ready to go and you need it, then the patient dies.

We got here, I think, about 7 o’clock and he was already in surgery.  And he didn’t come out of surgery until like, I think one.

His blood pressure continued to drop precipitously despite giving him a massive transfusion which was initiated of blood products in the emergency department.  Using an ultrasound we saw that he had free fluid in his abdomen, so based on his heart rate, blood pressure, and the ultrasound findings in the Emergency Department, he was taken directly to the operating room.

The first thing that was readily apparent was his entire right lobe of his liver, which is the majority of the liver, looked like it had exploded.

We mobilized his liver, and we actually had to control bleeding of the portal veins, the main veins draining the liver itself, and various arterial branches with sutures.

With a liver injury that, a lot of civilian trauma surgeons are not comfortable or do not have the experience managing operatively.  Although we all have the same training and education for the most part, again a lot of being able to do some of these things depends on having done them.

I honestly think that my experience in the deployed setting was almost entirely responsible for the fact that Josh is here today.

The nurse, Kelly, which I’ve talked highly about, I loved her, she came out and really reassured us that he was going to be ok. He was fighting.

Later on that evening and early morning, the patient had been stable and he was taken to the CT scanner.

Then it was at five they said we needed to come back, I mean, he was bleeding to death.

So now I had the patient who almost bled to death from his liver injury is now, as he’s becoming warm and perfused again, putting out litres of blood out of his chest.  He was taken from the CAT scanner directly back to the operating room where he underwent a right thoracotomy.

Then Dr. Bini said like they were for sure that they got everything. He lost 24 pints of blood. That’s a lot.

Being a strong young guy, he actually recovered very quickly, surprisingly quickly for the magnitude of his injuries.

All she was really concerned about was whether or not he was going to be there for their baby. And I said, my goal is to have him there when your babies born.

We came for his last checkup with Dr. Bini, a Friday, May 9, and I went into labor that night.  

So I was back in the hospital with my wife…yeah…again. But it was her turn. I was there to support her, yeah, be there for her, yeah, I was there for the whole birth of my son.

Man, let me tell you, he took this in stride. He has a faith, he has a positive attitude, and he’s surrounded by a loving, very supportive family.

I think the big guy led Dr. Bini in knowing, you know. It’s a big part of Dr. Bini, he has, you know, eyes everywhere and I don’t know. God knows, you know, 10 years from now, you know, he knows what’s gonna happen.