BOSTON (AP) -- An emergency room doctor recalls the horror, confusion
and occasional triumph in an unusual, raw account of treating some of
the first victims of the deadly Station nightclub fire in February.
"The spirit of every physician who ever taught us whispered into our
ears that night, offering advice," writes Dr. Michael J. Dacey in his
vivid memoir published in today's New England Journal of Medicine.
Dacey worked that night in the emergency room at Kent County Memorial
Hospital, in Warwick, just two miles from the nightclub. The fire in
West Warwick killed 100 people and injured nearly 200 others.
Dozens of the victims poured through the emergency room doors at Kent in
the hours after the fire. Many were racked with pain or straining for
breath, their clothing and bodies reeking of smoke.
"I had always imagined that in a situation like this, there would have
to be a single person in charge -- one general to lead the effort.
Nothing could have been further from the reality: from the clinical
medicine standpoint, there were at least 30 leaders, each gathered with
a small team at the bedsides of the most critically ill patients,"
writes Dacey.
People acted quickly and improvised. A pharmacist dumped the hospital's
whole reserve of morphine into small buckets so personnel could dull the
terrible pain of the burn victims. At another moment, the hospital
nearly ran out of ventilators, but more were delivered.
In the end, Dacey wonders whether the emergency room could have done
better.
However, he says rescuers and doctors acted courageously and skillfully
and "probably saved more lives than the fire took."
