Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [52]
Deaver turned to Fischer. “Go find out what’s going on in there.”
After Fischer hurried back to the trauma bay, a hospital worker in green scrubs approached Deaver. “Do you know the name of the patient in the emergency room?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Would you give me his name, please?”
“It’s Reagan. R-E-A-G-A-N.”
“First name?”
“Ron.”
The hospital employee kept scribbling.
“Address?”
“Sixteen hundred Pennsylvania.”
The man’s pencil stopped moving.
“You mean…?”
“Yes, you have the president of the United States in there.”
* * *
THE VOLUME OF noise in the trauma bay was now so high that Wendy Koenig gave up on using a stethoscope and instead placed a finger over the brachial artery in the president’s left arm, just below the blood pressure cuff. She inflated the device a third time, desperate to get a reading. Koenig released the air and waited; she sensed more than actually felt the bump as she watched the needle descend on the cuff’s pressure gauge. Reagan’s systolic blood pressure was about 60; his normal reading would be about 140. This was bad news: a reading of 60 indicated that he was in shock, and, as Koenig knew, most seventy-year-olds who came to the ER in a condition similar to Reagan’s did not survive.
Only five or six minutes had elapsed since the assassination attempt. Nurses and technicians were pumping crystalloid fluid, a salt solution, into Reagan’s body to boost his sagging blood pressure and reduce his chances of slipping further into shock. He had three IV lines running into his arms, and doctors had already ordered universal donor blood from the hospital blood bank.
Joyce Mitchell, the ER doctor, noticed the pile of clothes under the gurney and realized that Reagan’s shirt was spotted with blood. She told an orderly to rush the shirt to the laboratory so they could determine the president’s blood type. Another nurse drew blood from Reagan so it could be taken to the same lab. A moment later, another doctor turned to Jerry Parr: did he know the president’s blood type?
“O positive,” Parr replied.
By now, trauma surgeons were on their way to the emergency room. One of the first to arrive was William O’Neill, a thirty-year-old surgical intern who had been consulting with the family of a patient in a fourth-floor hallway when his pager started beeping. He politely excused himself and ran for the ER.
As he neared the nurses’ station, two men in suits grabbed the five-foot, six-inch O’Neill and lifted him into the air. “Who are you?” they demanded.
“I’m Dr. O’Neill. I’m on the trauma team.”
The agents flung O’Neill toward the trauma bay, where he found several doctors and nurses working frantically on a patient lying face-up on a gurney. His skin was gray and his lips were caked with blood. O’Neill, already experienced enough to make quick and fairly accurate assessments of new patients, thought the man might not survive.
All at once, O’Neill understood the scene around him. There was a reason the ER was so alive with activity: the well-dressed men he’d just encountered on his way here were Secret Service agents, and the man on the gurney was the president of the United States. He took a close look at the gray face of his patient and confirmed his identity.
O’Neill turned to the Secret Service agent who seemed to be in charge. “What happened?”
“There was a shooting and I shoved him into the car,” the agent said. “I think he may have broken a rib.”
O’Neill heard someone say that Reagan’s blood pressure was now 80, already 20 points better than when it was first measured. The fluids were working.
The doctor leaned over the gurney. “Hello, Mr. President, how are you doing?” he asked. “Where are you hurting?”
“I’m having a hard time breathing,” Reagan replied.
“Mr. President, do you know what happened?”
“Not really.”
Other doctors joined O’Neill at the president’s side, including Drew Scheele, another intern, who had been observing a surgery but wanted to see what was causing all the commotion in the ER. As he entered the trauma bay, he spotted the remnants of a nice blue