Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [68]
Giordano and Gens advocated a belly tap, but Aaron wasn’t sure it was necessary. The X-ray showed the bullet was lodged in the chest, not the abdomen. If he detected a problem in the president’s belly during surgery, he could fix it through the chest incision. But he also respected Giordano and Gens and wanted to avoid dissension among the trauma team, especially since they had been working together smoothly thus far. Because Aaron was now Reagan’s primary surgeon, it was his call whether the team should perform the procedure. In the scheme of things, a belly tap was rather harmless; also, the president was currently stable and his vital signs were decent. Aaron kept his doubts to himself and consented to the lavage.
Gens tried to take Reagan’s blood pressure, but the ER was still so noisy that he couldn’t hear anything through his stethoscope. As he inflated the cuff and slowly let out the air, he placed a finger over the radial artery in the president’s left wrist and waited to feel the tell-tale thump. The president’s blood pressure was still 160, high but acceptable under the circumstances.
As Gens prepared to leave for the operating room, he suddenly wondered whether anyone had told the president why he was in the hospital. The surgeon—a loquacious and earnest man who often lost track of time while talking to patients about everything from their conditions to sports—leaned close to Reagan’s ear and asked, “Mr. President, do you know what happened?”
“No,” Reagan said.
“First of all, you were shot in the chest, and the bullet has torn your lung apart and you are leaking blood and air,” Gens said.
Reagan looked surprised.
“We have to do two things,” Gens went on. “First, we have to do what we call a peritoneal lavage to see if there is any blood in your belly. If there is blood in your abdomen, we will do an abdominal incision to see what is bleeding. If there is no blood in your abdomen, then we turn you to your side, and Dr. Aaron will perform what we call a chest incision. He will then fix your lung. You are going to be okay. You are short of breath because of your injury, but you are going to be all right.”
Before being taken to the operating room, Reagan got the attention of Cyndi Hines, a technician who was monitoring his IVs, fluids, and blood pressure.
“What do you think?” the president asked her.
Hines smiled. She was pretty sure she knew what he was really asking: Am I going to be okay, or am I going to die? Patients, afraid to pester the doctors, asked her that question all the time. “I think you are doing all right,” she replied gently. “They are taking you to the OR. If you were really bad, they would be opening you up right here. I really think you are doing fine.”
The president grinned at her through his mask.
CHAPTER 11
OPERATING ROOM 2
At 2:57 p.m., exactly thirty minutes after the assassination attempt, doctors and nurses began wheeling President Reagan feetfirst out of the trauma bay. A Secret Service agent had already surveyed and secured the route to the operating room: it led down a hallway, past the urology department’s examination rooms, through the sprawling recovery room, and then down another corridor. The president would be taken into Operating Room 2, which was at the far left side of a hallway running between a total of thirteen operating rooms.
A couple of minutes earlier, Ben Aaron had informed Mrs. Reagan of the imminent surgery. Meeting with the first lady, Mike Deaver, and several family friends in the small office where they had been waiting for further news, Aaron explained that although the bullet had apparently not touched the president’s heart, it had come to rest in his lung.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Aaron said. “We’re going to take him and do an abdominal tap to find