‘Code Orange’ turns Saskatoon ER into ‘organized chaos’

Images of the injured will ‘be in my mind for a ‘very long time,’ MD says Emergency room physician Dr. Hassan Masri also worked in wartorn Syria.

When a “Code Orange” rang out in the Saskatchewan ER, it was “organized chaos.”

For many on the hospital front lines of the bus crash horror, it was a first — including for emergency room physician Dr. Hassan Masri.

“You have people who (have) never even heard of a Code Orange suddenly assembling into teams and working so well … There wasn’t a single hiccup in the entire night that I could remember,” Masri said in an interview with the Star. The doctor, who specializes in internal medicine, was still awake after a 12-hour shift.

“I just don’t think that it’s going to be very easy to fall asleep,” he said.

Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon, where Masri works, received patients who were aboard the Humboldt Broncos hockey team bus when it was involved in a fatal collision on Friday night near Nipawin, a three-hour drive away.

Scheduled on-call in the intensive care unit, Masri said he had not heard of the crash on the news before work, in the time he spent waking up and having dinner before his shift. The Code Orange was called shortly after he got in, allowing the hospital to bring on more physicians, respiratory therapists, nurses and other staff and hospital machinery, to support patient intake.

For the people police say were injured, it’s still unclear what the extent of those injuries were. Masri could not discuss the scope of injuries he witnessed and treated in the interest of protecting patient privacy, but said the images mentally brought him back to his time in Syria, where he volunteered at a hospital targeted by war violence.

“I was exposed to images that I still remember until today, and frankly what happened last night really brought all these images back,” he said. “It’s never normal to see young people injured in a horrible way like that, and those images will, I think, be in my mind for a very long time, and potentially, forever.”

The first people were sent to triage about an hour after his shift began, Masri said. Physicians wore red vests and nurses could be seen in yellow gowns, with medical teams dedicated to each individual patient in what he described as “a very strange, organized chaos.”

Though he estimates there were dozens of people in the emergency room, the sounds reverberating out of those walls were whispers compared with the volume of staff and work applied to care for the injured.

“It was incredibly loud but incredibly quiet at the same time. The teams were working like well-oiled machines, and you could hear a lot of noises,” he said, describing the chatter and sounds of the teams planning. “But at the same time, it was very quiet.”

He credits his colleagues, doctors and nurses,who came back to work just to attend to Humboldt victims.

He has also received an outpouring of support on social media in response to a post he wrote about the night. “The community around us recognizes that the tragedy was met with such huge response in the medical world, and I would argue, successfully, so people seem to be very grateful for that,” he said.