Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [53]
The patient stared up at Scheele. “Am I dying?” the man asked through the mask.
“No, you’re going to be fine,” answered Scheele. In fact, he could see that the man was in serious condition; he had no idea whether the patient would live or die. He still hadn’t focused on the man’s face and so had no idea who he was.
G. Wesley Price, a surgical resident, arrived soon after Scheele. Price had already had a long night and day. A twenty-five-year-old man, shot several times in the abdomen, had died in surgery early that morning; afterward, Price had continued with his usual duties, checking on patients and working in the pathology lab. Just minutes earlier, he’d been in the lab when he heard sirens on Pennsylvania Avenue. Looking out an open window, he saw a motorcade speeding toward the hospital. He sprinted downstairs to the emergency room, where a crowd was gathering in the far corner by the trauma bay.
“Who’s the patient?” Price asked a nurse.
“It’s the president!” the nurse replied.
“You’re kidding,” Price said. He walked the final ten feet into Bay 5A and there was Reagan, now naked, lying on a gurney. Bags of fluids were suspended above him, and a urologist had already inserted a Foley catheter to remove his urine.
As he entered the room, Price spoke to Judith Whinerey, the assistant head nurse. “Who is in charge?” he asked.
“You are,” replied Whinerey. Turning, she shouted to everyone in the bay, “Everybody, Dr. Price is here.”
Price, a thirty-one-year-old fourth-year resident, was now the most senior surgeon in the room. The nurses and O’Neill told him what they knew: Reagan had walked into the ER and collapsed. His blood pressure was low, and they were giving him fluids and waiting on blood from the hospital blood bank.
“I can’t breathe,” the president said again. “My chest hurts.”
Price leaned over his patient. “Hello, Mr. President, I’m Dr. Price.” He pulled out his stethoscope and pressed it to the right side of the president’s chest. It was difficult to hear anything in the din, but Price detected a light rush of air and decided the right lung sounded normal. But when he moved the stethoscope to the left side of Reagan’s chest, he heard nothing, which meant the left lung wasn’t functioning and had probably collapsed.
“I don’t hear very good breath sounds on the left side,” Price said. “We’d better roll him over.”
As nurses and doctors gently turned Reagan onto his right side under the trauma bay’s bright lights, Price noticed what appeared to be a small slit in the president’s skin. Half an inch long, it was about five inches below the left armpit. A few drops of blood dribbled out of the wound.
Price turned to the Secret Service agent standing nearby—Jerry Parr—and asked what had happened. Parr briefly described the shooting and the chaos at the Hilton. As Parr finished, Daniel Ruge introduced himself to Price and told him that the president had coughed up blood on the way to the hospital.
Price looked again at the wound.
As he did, Drew Scheele—a Vietnam War veteran who had himself been shot in combat—leaned in. “That’s a gunshot wound,” the intern said.
Price nodded and turned to Parr and Ruge. “He’s been shot.”
Ruge leaned down and informed the president that he’d been wounded. “Everything is going to be okay,” Ruge told him.
Price had treated many gunshot wounds to the chest and knew that the first order of business was to insert a tube to drain blood and air, one or both of which must be collecting in the chest cavity. Pressure was almost certainly preventing the left lung from inflating; draining the blood and releasing the air would allow the lung to reexpand. Price thumped the president’s chest with his fingers but heard only a dull thud through his stethoscope, a sure sign that the chest was filling mostly with blood; air would have produced a hollow sound.
A gunshot wound, a collapsed lung,