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A phone call woke Steve Rooney in the
middle of the night, telling him his 19-year-old daughter had
been in a car accident, a bad car accident. He booked the first
flight out of Chicago.
His daughter had been ejected from a flipping car. Her lungs
were punctured; every rib on her left side was broken. Her
scapula, her clavicle, her pelvis and her right hip were
fractured. Steve was scared and did not know a lot about Fort
Myers. He wondered on the flight if his daughter would receive
the care she would need to survive.
“I could not have been more impressed,” Steve says of Lee
Memorial Health System’s Regional Trauma Center. “The level of
care, the expertise, the professionalism, the communication
between the doctors and nurses, the communication with our
family, it was unlike anything I've ever experienced before.
Nothing fell between the cracks.”
Steve takes deep breaths when he recalls the details – the tubes
in Therese's lungs, her ventilator, her bruises, her skin
feeling like “Rice Krispies,” her emergency surgery discovering
a blood clot in her lung, her induced paralytic state allowing
her body to heal. He remembers doctors and nurses gently
reiterating, “She's a very sick girl.”
And he remembers the two-week moment of ease, when Registered
Nurse Elaine Hildebrand looked at him and said something like,
“I believe at this point, unless she just falls out of the bed,
she's going to be okay.” Elaine credits such triumphs to the
care of the entire interdisciplinary trauma team and extends
appreciation to all hospital employees, from housekeeping to the
kitchen.
A year after her life-threatening incident, Therese still feels
some lasting pain in her hip and she may face permanent nerve
damage in her lower right leg and foot. But as her dad says,
“She got her life back.”
As one of her bedside nurses, Elaine remembers when Therese
opened her eyes, when she started following commands, when she
“turned the page.” Working in the Lee Memorial Health System
trauma intensive care for six years, Elaine says a nurse can
never prepare a speech for a family. But being at the bedside,
spending hours of every day with concerned loved ones, a nurse
must offer support, patience and constant reassurance.
“Every day as a nurse, you always treat somebody as if they were
your own family,” Elaine says. “You treat them with respect. You
step back and think … that could be my mother asking questions
about me. You really have to put yourself in the family's shoes
every day, every single day. That's your responsibility as a
nurse, remembering it could be me in that bed, it could be my
dad.”
I wanted to share this story with you because it highlights the
truly dedicated and caring team of professionals we have working
at our Trauma Center. These nurses, trauma surgeons and those
dedicated staff who support them are the ones who are often
on-call during the most tragic and terrible of accidents. They
are often the ones who put us back together and help us heal.
Our community is truly fortunate to have such a wonderful team
right here close to home to care for those near and dear to our
hearts.
Peace,
Jim Nathan, LMHS President
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