Uncertainty over fate of loved ones agonizing
As Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre mobilized Monday to treat a torrent of acutely injured patients, the hospital was confronted with a heart-wrenching personal dilemma, too.
Most victims of the van attack brought to Sunnybrook — including two who arrived deceased — could not initially be identified, says Dr. Fred Brenneman, one of the trauma surgeons on duty.
For the already-distraught relatives who descended on the hospital, that was devastating, he said.
“We had family members in our family-information room who didn’t know if their loved one was alive in our ICU, or dead at the scene,” Brenneman said. “It was extremely difficult to deal with that — the uncertainty, the anxiety, the lack of information … The problem is we couldn’t give them the answer, because we didn’t know. That was a unique situation.”
Within an hour of the first ambulances arriving, the hospital had set up an auditorium as a reception centre for family, with social workers and psychologists on hand.
Sunnybrook received 10 of 16 patients, including the pair who came in with no vital signs, and about three quarters were unidentified at first, said the surgeon.
The large number of patients and the fact they included two dead people made the process of naming them particularly difficult. And staff were anxious to avoid making any mistakes, he said.
All were eventually identified, though.
Sunnybrook is the Toronto region’s main trauma centre and calls itself the largest in Canada. It might receive 10 badly injured patients in a 24-hour day, but never all at once, said Brenneman.
Various types of trauma surgeons, emergency nurses, X-ray technicians, respiratory therapists and other staff not scheduled to come in Monday afternoon volunteered without prompting. Eventually, the hospital had assembled three trauma teams, triple the number usually on duty, said Brenneman.
Meanwhile, other hospitals in the area offered to take less severely ill patients from Sunnybrook, freeing resources.
None of the injuries were “unique,” but were generally severe, said the surgeon. Most were blunt-force trauma, but there were penetrating injuries, as well, including amputations, he said.
“It was the whole spectrum of injuries: head injuries, internal bleeding, spine injuries, extremity bone fractures, punctured lungs.”
The patients remained in critical or serious condition Tuesday, but Sunnybrook is optimistic all will survive.
As for the staff who worked for hours to save those lives, they are trained and accustomed to keeping their emotions at bay, said Brenneman.
“I would say that panic is not anything that can happen, because if you panic or get too agitated, things just don’t go so well,” he said. “Obviously, it’s difficult to see families in so much pain, because their loved ones are so badly injured. But at the time, you just focus on the task at hand.”