Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [67]
Once the doctors decided to allow Mrs. Reagan to see her husband, Tsangaris retrieved the first lady and led her to the far corner of the ER and the trauma bay. Accompanying her were Paul Laxalt and George Opfer.
When Mrs. Reagan entered the bay through its parted curtains, she was badly shaken by the sight of her wounded husband lying on the gurney. IV lines stretched from his arms and a clear oxygen mask covered his face. His skin was shockingly pale, and the first lady immediately spotted the caked blood on his lips. She also noticed that his new blue suit—the one she had had made for him—was a shredded mess, crumpled in the corner of the bay. Laxalt, beside her, saw a frightened look in Reagan’s eyes; Opfer thought the president looked terribly gray.
But when Reagan saw his wife as she reached out to comfort him, his spirits seemed to lift. Even though he was still struggling to breathe, he pulled up the oxygen mask and reprised a famous remark made by boxer Jack Dempsey after he lost the heavyweight championship in 1926.
“Honey,” the president said, “I forgot to duck.”
Reagan then turned to Laxalt. “Don’t worry about me, I’ll make it.”
Mrs. Reagan gently put the oxygen mask back on. “Please, don’t try to talk,” she said.
The first lady kissed the president’s cheek and left the bay. It was time for the trauma team to get back to work.
* * *
THE CHEST TUBE wasn’t stopping the bleeding; the Pleur-evac now held 1.8 liters of the president’s blood. Looking down at his patient, Ben Aaron knew it was time to make a decision. Should he operate or not?
As he considered his options, Aaron was particularly concerned about two issues, neither of them medical. First, the surgeon wanted to get Reagan out of the trauma bay. It was too crowded and too noisy, and he had too little control. Aaron had dominion in only one place: the operating room. Reagan would be safer there because Aaron would be in full command, and the throng of spectators and hangers-on would be much smaller. Second, even if the bleeding stopped and the bullet seemed secure, Aaron felt queasy about the political ramifications of leaving a fragment of metal lodged in the president’s chest. The knowledge that a bullet remained just an inch from the commander in chief’s heart and near so many other important organs would almost certainly cause intense anxiety in the country and the world.
Aaron made up his mind: he would operate. He informed Joe Giordano and the other doctors on the team, and then bent down to the president.
“Mr. President, there is a lot of blood coming from your chest tube,” Aaron said. “We know the bullet is in your chest. But we don’t know what has been injured. Because the blood continues to come, we think it would be safest to take you to the operating room. We don’t think you are in any immediate danger. But we think that is the safest course, going to the operating room.”
The president nodded. “Whatever you think is best,” he said from behind his oxygen mask. “I leave it up to you.”
By now, the surgeons knew that the second X-ray revealed no shrapnel in the president’s abdomen. Even so, Giordano and Gens worried that the bullet might have penetrated Reagan’s diaphragm, a muscle less than a half inch thick that separates the abdomen from the chest cavity. If it had pierced the diaphragm, it could have penetrated an organ such as the stomach or spleen before passing back through the diaphragm and lodging in the chest. The doctors also feared that a seventy-year-old being thrown violently into a limousine might have sustained a rupture of his liver, appendix, or kidneys. The only way to find out whether there was bleeding in the abdomen was to administer a peritoneal lavage, or “belly tap.” In