Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [46]
In Trauma Bay 5, a curtained-off area on the northeast side of the ER crammed with equipment and supplies, Dr. Joyce Mitchell, an attending emergency-room physician, was examining an elderly woman who had suffered a heart attack. The woman had arrived in the ER that afternoon and been stabilized; she was now resting on a gurney near a wall of shelves stacked with medical equipment, gauze pads, medication, monitors, tubes, instruments, and clean sheets. As Mitchell prepared to transfer the woman to intensive care, a police radio crackled in the hands of a nearby officer who was taking a report.
The policeman pressed the radio to his ear and listened for a few seconds. Then he spoke in a loud, angry voice. “I’m tired of my buddies getting shot down!”
“Please,” an ER nurse said. “Keep your voice down.”
The officer became more upset. “There’s a cop down, there is a cop down at the Hilton!” he shouted. “The president was there.”
Mitchell knew that anyone shot at the Hilton could be coming their way. She immediately turned to Kathy Paul, an experienced emergency room nurse, and said, “Maybe you should set up the other room for a trauma patient. It sounds like somebody has been shot at the Hilton.”
The elderly woman on the gurney was wheeled to a nearby room, and a nurse drew a curtain that divided the trauma bay into two units, 5A and 5B.
A moment later, a small white telephone began to ring at the ER nurses’ station. Tucked away in the corner of the desk, it was the special White House telephone, which was never to be touched unless it rang. It was a direct line to the White House signal operator, installed sometime in the 1970s to speed communication between the White House and its closest emergency room.
A busy clerk at the nurses’ station ignored the ringing. Wendy Koenig, a nurse doing paperwork within reach of the phone, watched and listened as it rang once, then twice. On the rare occasions when the white telephone rang, it usually stopped after a couple of rings—perhaps someone at the White House had dialed the wrong number. But this time the phone rang a third time. Koenig answered.
Before she could say a word, a gruff male voice told her that the presidential motorcade was on its way to the hospital. Then the line went silent.
Koenig’s face turned white. “The presidential motorcade is on its way,” she told the assistant nurse in charge of the unit, Judith Whinerey.
“That means the president is coming here,” Whinerey said. “Let’s assume it’s the president.”
Whinerey, who had been gathering her things to leave for a doctor’s appointment, picked up the phone and got her doctor on the line. “I have to cancel,” she told her. “The president is coming here. Turn on your television.”
Whinerey hung up and began calling the heads of every department and specialty in the hospital. If the president really was coming to GW, she wanted the hospital’s most experienced doctors on hand in the ER. Her hands trembled as she flipped through the hospital’s phone book. “I’m so nervous that my hands, they won’t stop shaking,” Whinerey told a clerk as she cradled two telephones to her ears. “You have to help me.”
“You’ll be fine,” the clerk replied. “I can’t help you. My hands are shaking, too.”
A minute later, the White House telephone rang again. This time, the clerk at the nurse’s station picked it up.
“We have three gunshot wounds coming in,” a voice said. Again the line went dead. Wendy Koenig hurried to the trauma bay to get intravenous lines and equipment ready for arrivals. Joyce Mitchell and Kathy Paul headed toward the emergency room’s entrance. All