Montreal doc tends victims of U.S. mass shootings
It’s never good news when Dr. Rick Miller’s emergency cellphone starts beeping.
The Montreal-born chief of trauma and surgical critical care at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University Medical Center, was in the midst of explaining to me the madness of trying to deal with three mass shootings in the area since last September — including the carnage three weeks ago at the Waffle House, resulting in four deaths and four injuries.
And it wasn’t good news this time either.
Having received a “yellow alert for mass casualties,” Miller cut short our conversation to get details on a lone gunman opening fire at the crowded Opry Mills mall and to ready his team for incoming casualties.
The shooter ended up killing one person before being apprehended, but, fortunately, there were no other casualties.
Regardless, the level of anxiety and concern among Miller and his team is so elevated that they have to fear the worst. The spate of mass shootings in the U.S. has reached epidemic proportions. Making matters worse for critical-care teams is the number of shootings involving semi-automatic assault rifles, as was the case in Las Vegas as well as at the Waffle House, where an AR-15 rifle was employed.
“What makes these shootings so jarring for me is that I was born and raised in Montreal, where there were few incidences of this type of violence,” Miller, 60, said — on his other cellphone. “We lived a pretty idyllic existence, and gunshot wounds and violent crime were not things we were used to.”
The son of noted Montreal casting agent Vera Miller left Montreal in 1977 after receiving a swimming scholarship to the University of South Florida, where he would pursue his medical studies. While acknowledging that Montreal and the rest of Canada have since seen their share of shootings and other sorts of rampages, these crimes still fall far short of what has transpired to the south.
“Over the almost 30 years that I’ve been doing this trauma surgery, you learn that it’s a different world here in the U.S. And in the last 10 years, it has become really eye-opening as far as the mass tragedies are concerned. They have grown exponentially.
“To have them in three different environments — one in a high school, one in a church and the most recent one at the Waffle House — where innocent people are going through their regular daily routines and are suddenly put in harm’s way is so troubling. It’s so hard for me to comprehend the incidence of mass random shootings of innocent people.”
The Nashville church shooting of last September resulted in one death and seven injuries, while the January rampage at the high school in Benton, Ky., left two students killed and 18 wounded. Miller notes that, although the latter attack took place on Jan. 23, it was already the 11th school shooting of the year.
“I was the trauma team lead in the high school shooting, and it was brutal. We can handle
40 to 50 trauma patients, but when you have high-school kids deathly ill after being shot, that creates a different mindset. I worked on one kid who was shot right through the head and subsequently became brain-dead. His parents were there. That will always remain permanently embedded in my mind.”
Not surprisingly, trauma surgeons all over the U.S. have spoken out on gun control, particularly relating to automatic weapons. “We understand people’s rights, but there is absolutely no reason to have automatic weaponry,” Miller says. “And the way that people can get guns is just too easy. There are really no good background checks on folks.
“It’s really scary when it comes to the point that you have to go through metal detectors in high schools.”
As horrible as gunshot injuries are to deal with, those involving semi-automatic rifles like the one used at the Waffle House are far more difficult to handle. And if it weren’t for the heroics of James Shaw Jr. — who was able to disarm the half-naked Waffle House killer — the casualties would have been far greater.
“Shaw probably saved multiple lives, because the shooter had another cassette of bullets. But the damage that this did was unbelievable.
“The type of implosion that the automatic weapon does is way different than that of a handgun. These are devastating injuries that are permanent. Of the four major injuries, we had one where a girl had a giant segment of her
leg blown off, with all her bone in the area gone. Words can’t describe that kind of horror.”
Prior to the Opry Mills mall shooting, Miller’s trauma team treated a victim who had been shot 13 times with an automatic weapon.
“You have to count the holes and they have to be an even amount of holes. Otherwise you have to find a hole and a bullet, and then you have to figure out which trajectory is going to kill a patient first. Fortunately, this patient was saved.”
Miller got the call for the Waffle House shooting at 3 a.m. “Whenever there is a disaster, I come in. Normally, there is always a trauma surgeon here 24 hours a day. We have to be at the ready always. We’re now the fourth largest trauma centre in the country, seeing over 4,500 trauma patients a year. We have eight helicopters, two fixed wings … it’s a machine. If patients come here alive, I figure we have a 95 per cent chance of keeping them alive.”
Given the magnitude of patients, one might expect Miller and his team to be somewhat detached — in order to keep their sanity.
“We do not get numbed,” Miller insists. “We’re constantly battling the quest not to let this happen as well as to find ways to reduce this access to killing weapons. Until I retire, I’m going to fight this battle along with our trauma surgeons. And, frankly, there’s nothing more rewarding than saving a patient.”