Doctor recalls dedication amid disaster
Critical care physician buoyed by image of surviving teammates clasping hands
Hassan Masri has been a critical care physician at Saskatoon’s Royal University Hospital for three years. For him, a Code Orange — a mass-casualty incident — was something you practised, but not something that happened in real life.
But on Friday night, shortly after he began his 8 p.m. shift, the unthinkable became real. What began with news reports of a serious highway accident soon transformed into a live Code Orange. Nurses, technicians and his fellow doctors streamed into the hospital, preparing for what would be a wave of ambulances.
In a Facebook post Saturday, Masri, 34, described his 13-hour shift tending to the young victims of the Humboldt Broncos bus crash as “the longest, worst and most tragic night of my career. The images can’t be unseen or forgotten, the stories can’t be unheard or ignored.”
But amid the tragedy, Masri said in an interview, medical professionals came together with a single purpose. “Most people had never been in a mass-casualty Code Orange before. Things were running very, very smoothly,” he said. “People were focused on one thing: making the tragedy less tragic.”
Some hospital staff had connections to the Broncos, but everyone could relate to the horror of a hockey team cut down as it travelled to a game along rural highways. “This is family to them,” Masri said. “It makes it very personal.”
Accustomed in his regular practice to having good news to share with patients and their families “nine times out of 10,” Masri was struck Friday by how even news of a serious injury brought smiles to loved ones’ faces.
“They were just relieved that their family member was alive,” he said. For the trauma teams jumping from one patient to the next, it was a blur. “We started receiving patients around 9 or 10 p.m. I remember looking at my phone at one point to see what time it was, and it was already six in the morning.”
It was after all the victims who could be saved had been stabilized, Masri said, that the emotional impact hit. The trigger, for him was seeing on a news site a photograph taken in his hospital, three surviving teammates clasping each other’s hands as they lay on beds side by side. “That image is engraved in my head for maybe 50 years to come,” he said. He had a special word of thanks to the nurses in the emergency department and intensive care unit.
“Your tears made it easier for my tears to flow,” he wrote. “Your passion, care and love is so admirable. I thank you for being the amazing humans that you are. You saved many lives and comforted 100s of other lives.”
On Saturday, five hours after his overnight shift ended, Masri had still not slept. “Everything keeps playing in your head,” he said.