Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [109]
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RONALD AND NANCY Reagan were forever grateful to the doctors and nurses who saved the president’s life. A decade after the shooting, the Reagans attended a gathering at George Washington University Hospital to commemorate the event and to announce the renaming of the emergency department: it became the Ronald Reagan Institute of Emergency Medicine. The speakers told a number of jokes, and everyone particularly enjoyed recalling the note Reagan wrote to Denise Sullivan: “Does Nancy know about us?” A few days later, Sullivan received a handwritten note from the president. Chagrined that he might have embarrassed her, Reagan apologized for his “ill-timed joke 10 years ago” but went on to write that “your hand clasp was one of the most comforting things done for me during all of my hospital stay.”
Dr. Joseph Giordano, who retired in 2010 as chairman of surgery for the George Washington University Medical Center, also received occasional notes from Reagan. In 1984, when Giordano was supporting Walter Mondale, a Democrat, for president, he wrote an op-ed piece that attacked the president’s position on government assistance. Within days, Giordano received a letter from the president. “There has been a steady drumbeat of political demagoguery duly reported in the press that we have slashed away at essential social programs in our cost-cutting efforts,” Reagan wrote. “The truth is we have done no such thing.… I owe you too much to let you go on believing the current propaganda.” A decade after the shooting, the Reagans dropped Giordano a kind note when they heard about the death of his father.
A year after the assassination attempt, Dr. Benjamin Aaron, Dr. David Gens, and Dr. Paul Colombani paid a house call to see how the president was doing, and a film crew making a documentary on behalf of the hospital tagged along. Reagan said he appreciated the doctors’ efforts to save his life, but he also told them he had a question. “I understand that you really kind of loaded me up with other people’s blood, about a whole full charge, and now am I back on my own blood now, and if so where did all of the other blood go?” Aaron explained that the donated blood broke down quickly and was replaced by new blood produced by the president’s body. Satisfied with the answer, Reagan chatted with them for a few more minutes and then thanked them again.
Ben Aaron retired from GW in 1996, but not before performing surgery on several other prominent patients, including future vice president Dick Cheney. (Aaron performed heart bypass surgery on Cheney in 1988, just before Cheney became defense secretary in George H. W. Bush’s administration.) Currently, David Gens is a senior attending surgeon at the University of Maryland’s R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center, and Paul Colombani is the chief of pediatric surgery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.
The George Washington University Hospital building where Reagan was treated was demolished in 2003, a year after a new facility was erected across the street at a cost of $96 million. But the emergency department still bears the president’s name, and the hospital remains classified by the city government as a Level 1 trauma center. In the years after Reagan was shot, trauma care in the United States has steadily improved, despite the elimination of a federal program that oversaw the development of trauma centers and emergency response systems around the country. In 1981, there were 145 Level 1 and Level 2 trauma centers in the nation. Today, there are more than 470 such