[Histonet] Joplin's article

[Reuel Cornelia]

  To those who were not able to open to the site, I tried to copy and
paste and hopefully you can read it. This is a very interesting story
about Joplin's St John's Regional Medical Center and code Gray.
If you still have problems. please visit this link. 
http://m.kansascity.com/kcstar/db_41535/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=0kA2g6z2&src=cat&full=true#display

 
By ERIC ADLER and LAURA BAUER 
The Kansas City Star 
JOPLIN, Mo. | Looking back, they remember the quiet — like a last, deep
breath before death. 
In the nursery of St. John’s Regional Medical Center, newborns napped
in bassinets. Ventilators hummed in an intensive-care unit. 
In the emergency room, nurse Tracy Hernandez checked an older woman for
a stroke, one of the few serious cases in the ER all day. 
In an operating room down a second-floor hallway, orthopedic surgeon
James “Dusty” Smith opened an infected hip. 
One floor above, John Seay, a 60-year-old mechanic from Welch, Okla.,
visited with his 83-year-old mother. Frail from congestive heart
failure, she doubted she’d be getting better and had picked out a pink
dress for her burial. 
Then, in the west, the air began to spin. 
Condition Gray. 
The announcement over the hospital speakers warned of a potential
tornado. Prepare. 
No one panicked. Such calls are routine in Joplin, a zinc- and 
lead-mining town carved from the rock and fields of Tornado Alley. 
Nurses pulled shades over windows to shield from flying debris. They
rolled equipment from the halls, on the off chance patients would have
to be moved there. 
Off chance, because this storm wasn’t expected to hit them. Visitors
watched it on television with nonchalance. Radar showed funnel clouds
tracking north. 
In a neighborhood across from St. John’s, Amanda and Bradley German sat
in a friend’s home with their sons, Brody, 6, and James, 9, heedless of
the weather alert. Small hail fell. The friend tossed hailstones
playfully into the house. 
“We were joking about it,” Amanda German would say. “We hear the storm
sirens all the time.” 
What no one anticipated was the dark monster developing to the west,
two miles outside their windows. 
The sky turned the green of a violent bruise. 
Execute Condition Gray: Get patients to safety! 
• • • 
It’s been four weeks since an EF-5 tornado slammed to the ground in
Joplin, its 200-mph winds scouring a three-quarter-mile-wide,
six-mile-long band of devastation. 
When it was over, this city of 50,000 would reel, broken and bloodied.

For the watching world, the image of the hollowed shell of St. John’s
was ground zero. For 115 years, the hospital system created by the
Catholic order of the Sisters of Mercy healed the community’s illnesses
and injuries. In seconds, the nine-story symbol of the city’s strength
and caring, built and expanded since 1968, would stand gravely injured
itself. 
Yet in many ways, the story of what happened inside the walls of St.
John’s might better stand as a microcosm of the horrors, heroism and
humanity that played out across Joplin that night. 
Witness upon witness recounts a stream of “walking wounded,”
individuals impaled by wood, glass or metal, limbs missing, flesh torn
from their bodies, lurching toward the hospital. Many remain haunted by
the carnage they saw. 
But that night at the hospital, they said, also will be remembered as
one of the city’s proudest. 
There was the surgeon who operated by flashlight as the hospital
crashed around him. The ER doc who plunged a chest tube through the ribs
of a young man to keep him from dying. 
Nurses used their bodies to blanket vulnerable patients from
wind-hurled debris. A floor tech plucked a flying man from the air.
Employees wielded axes to free drugs from locked cabinets. 
And then there were the strangers. Hundreds rushed in convoys of pickup
trucks, descending on the hospital to speed the wounded away. 
Hospital visitors left the sides of their dead and dying loved ones to
carry fragile patients down blackened hallways, guided by the dim light
of cell phones. 
“We did what we had to do,” said John Seay. 
• • • 
At 5:41 p.m., the tornado descends, a black, twisting wall on the
western horizon. It splinters houses, strips trees, heaves cars.
Hailstones crash through glass like sledgehammers. Rain pounds down in a
stinging curtain. 
Minutes away, St. John’s waits — 183 patients in its 367 licensed beds;
some 25 patients in the ER; 100 staff on duty; an unknown number of
visitors in the patient rooms, halls and waiting areas. 
In the ER, Angie Abner, 40 — a paramedic who became a nurse only a year
ago, and who has missed work the last two days because of food poisoning
— has been doing triage. Now, minutes after the call Execute Condition
Gray, she is struggling to get patients to safety, into hallways and
away from windows. 
People, having grown too used to these warnings and then seeing storms
peter out, refuse to move. 
“Folks, this is for your own safety,” Abner belts, emphatic. “You have
to listen to me!” 
A man waves her off and tries to leave. 
“No, sir!” she snaps. “You are my responsibility and you’re not going
anywhere!” 
Upstairs, in the third-floor intensive-care unit, nurse Tammy Fritchey,
a 27-year-veteran, places blankets and pillows over patients who are too
sick to move, the ones on ventilators. With two other nurses, she will
soon huddle in an interior office. 
“God,” she’ll pray silently, holding tight to another nurse. “Please
help our patients.” 
On other floors, patients able to walk are placed in hardback chairs or
wheelchairs and lined up down the hallways. Others are rolled out in
their beds. 
Condition Grays are practiced as drills at least a dozen times a year.
All hospitals, as part of their accreditation, have emergency codes and
plans for storms, abducted babies, gunmen on the premises. 
But this is no drill. 
In Room 587, Connie Lansdown, 62, has just taken a shower. Weak and
recovering from a hysterectomy, a treatment for possible cancer, she
wears a hospital gown, a robe and flip-flops. 
Below, near Room 381, the mechanic John Seay stands in the hall next to
his mother’s bed. She’s on oxygen and has been visiting with more than a
dozen relatives all afternoon. Seay is calm, sure nothing will happen. 
So is Belinda Pfeiffer, 58, who with her brother Rodney Stover, 60, is
in the hallway with their 85-year-old father, Ralph Stover. He’s to be
released the next day into rehab after complications from a recent
corneal transplant. Pfeiffer feels so calm she feeds her dad spoonfuls
of pureed beef and green beans near Room 386. 
In the eighth-floor obstetrics unit, fathers are close by their newborn
babies. In the operating room, surgeon Dusty Smith, wearing a sterile
mask and baby-blue scrubs, is just about to drain a woman’s infected hip
joint. The woman is anesthetized. His scalpel is at work. 
Near the ER’s glass doors, Kevin Kikta, 40, one of only two emergency
physicians on duty, stands with a patient’s chart. He looks up and sees
a security guard tearing down the corridor. 
“Take cover!” the guard shouts. “We’re gonna get hit!” 
• • • 
Wind roars with such force the steel beams supporting the hospital’s
top floors twist four inches. 
Glass explodes from every window; the air turns cold; lights flicker
and die. The building jolts and is cloaked in blackness. Both
generators, main and backup, have been blasted from their foundations. 
Water pipes burst, showering everything. Ceilings cave; wires hang in
the air like spider webs and spill on the floor. Explosive natural gas
spews from broken pipes on the lower floors. 
The wind’s power is tremendous. Connie Lansdown, the hysterectomy
patient, watches the storm yank a man from a reclining chair and drag
him down the hall. 
“This is no place to be!” she thinks, hurrying into a windowless room
and pressing her shoulder against the door. 
X-ray machines, respirators, computer monitors and doors ripped from
their hinges ricochet down the halls, spin and crash through the air. 
Fathers in the nursery drape themselves over their newborns. 
In her bed, John Seay’s mother is being sucked down the corridor.
Knocked to a knee, he covers her with one arm. 
“I gotcha,” he says. 
He drives his foot into the floor to stop the movement, but can’t. They
sail down the hall and crash. 
He looks at his mother. Her eyes are shut; her oxygen mask is still on.
She looks OK. 
“I’m going to check on the others,” he tells her and leaves to search
for their relatives. 
Outside the ER, the wind catapults a man through the emergency unit’s
blown-out entryway, where St. John’s floor tech Ben Graskemper, 31, a
volunteer firefighter as imposing as a bouncer, snatches him from the
air and shields him beneath his body.