You’re gonna kill this guy. She had good hands and good judgment and a methodical approach to the craft. Two police officers had been observing from a distance with pens in hand and notepads open. The first patient, shot in the neck, was a young man accompanied by his girlfriend, who sat next to him on the bed with an expression of concern. Nope. In the trauma bay, the surgeons taped a paper clip over the entry wound so they could identify that spot on the X-ray. “You think you know what happens here?” Scott Charles asked me. She wore a gray mock-turtleneck sweater with no sleeves. They were on pain medication that slowed their speech. A tube to drain fluids was snaking out of his chest. She started thinking that Temple should find a way to intervene—to try to talk to patients while they’re in the hospital so they would never need to come back. But there’s nothing that can prepare you for what bullets do to human bodies. Colon learned to sop up the excess acid from his exposed intestines with gauze pads and later with a machine that sucked the acid through a tube. His heart stopped beating. When she wasn’t there, she went on rounds, taking the elevator up to the eighth and ninth floors to check in with patients recovering from earlier traumas. She usually talked about running. You go upstairs. A city prosecutor who handled shooting investigations once told me that the surgeons were able to piece people back together after the most horrific acts of violence. This is not trauma surgery. She can also clamp the aorta, the largest artery in the body, so that instead of the blood going down into the bowels, where it’s needed less, the blood goes up to the brain. It’s the heart beating and the lungs bringing air. The main thing people get wrong when they imagine being shot is that they think the bullet itself is the problem. He needed a CT scan. But Goldberg argued that she wasn’t judging anyone’s past or even asking about it. “We’ll probably send her home tonight,” Goldberg said. You’re the worst. She gave a brief acceptance speech focusing on the importance of teamwork to medical excellence. “You never forget that sound,” one of the Temple nurses told me. In the hallway next to the ER, she opened a door and I followed her into a small darkened room where six young doctors sat at computers. “The thing that allows us to do so much of this is she carries a big stick,” Charles said. Finlay is a photographer and film director based in New York City. He cried out. In especially serious cases, 70 times at Temple last year, the surgeons will crack a chest right there in the trauma area. “Unfortunately we get a lot of penetrating traumas,” she said. You call yourself a good trauma surgeon. The bullet tore through his intestines. He remembers that she was the doctor who would notice when he was feeling despair and let him eat a little something that the nurses wouldn’t necessarily allow, like a small chip of ice, or sometimes a piece of candy. Goldberg is 5 feet 2 inches tall, with a runner’s build. The woman was shot once in the thigh with a small entry wound but no exit wound—a stray bullet that struck her while she was walking down the street. Charles said they get the occasional victim of a long gun, such as an AR-15 or an AK-47, “but what’s remarkable is how common handguns are.”, Goldberg jumped in. Trauma surgery is about fixing the damage the bullet causes as it rips through muscle and vessel and organ and bone. Lusk is also a co-host on a film and media podcast, "AVHD Podcast". A sign on a bulletin board said WELCOME TO SICU! There was a teenage boy in August 1992 who was shot in the heart. Prior to his time at Temple, Chaney coached Cheney University for 10 years, capturing the NCAA Division II title in 1978. The University of Cincinnati women's basketball team lost their fourth straight match against American Athletic Conference rivals Temple University, with a final score of 69-53. One day at the hospital, I saw her go on rounds, meeting with patients in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit (SICU) on the ninth floor. Every so often, she may also have to break the patient’s sternum—a bilateral thoracotomy. One patient a few years ago was shot in the face with a shotgun at close range over some money owed. Positive self-talk. “She said, ‘Don’t go anywhere else,’” Charles recalled. You suck. When Goldberg first saw Scott Charles talk to a group of children, she knew she needed him on her team. Goldberg said they would try to help with that and rubbed her fingers across his hand in a gesture of tenderness. “When I get angry, and hurt,” she told me, “it’s because I can still be a little naïve.” Even after all this time, the sense of horror she first experienced as a resident treating gun patients has never completely gone away. And it sounds like metal, but you know it’s bone. It took her that long to get the authority, to gather the data, to get it published, to shift the system a little bit. The forecast showed rising temperatures. The University of Cincinnati women’s basketball team fell to Temple University 53-69 on Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2021 at Fifth Third Arena in Cincinnati. 2020 season schedule, scores, stats, and highlights. “No?”, Goldberg walked over to another doctor and said, “So are you troubled by the fact that he’s not screaming? She particularly loved anatomy. And most disturbing of all, the two bullet wounds on his hand, a sign that Lamont was trying to shield his face from the bullets at close range. Trauma surgeons at Temple had to open his abdomen to repair the injuries, but fistulas developed, holes that wouldn’t heal, and until they healed, the incision couldn’t be closed. “They’d say, ‘No, 18.’” He could tell when the residents were stressed out by how many Diet Cokes they drank. “Where is the injury? Freshman Jillian Hayes, who's been enjoying a breakout season averaging 8.3 points per game (ppg), was off-kilter against the Owls – shooting only 3-17. And everybody—every body—has its own kind of quality. I wondered what surgeons know about gun violence that the rest of us don’t. He couldn’t eat normally—he was being fed intravenously—but “the fact that I could get a piece of ice, it was like heaven.”, She has gotten more sensitive over the years, she said. One patient was an older man who had been beaten up and complained of stomach pain. Freshman Caitlyn Wilson put up a career-high 23 points on 8-13 shooting, draining five three-pointers on the night. Sometimes he lugs them to subway stations and offers them to commuters. I left the hospital before lunch. The bullet clipped the femoral artery and she bled. “Cut the umbilical cord, huh?” he said, and laughed softly. “It’s like a tink, tink, tink. His abdomen. If I don’t get this position for you, you can cash the check, it’s yours, and take another job.’ And I was like—this white lady’s crazy. He has an arm that’s so freaking broken and he’s not screaming.” She frowned. (The surgeries in the trauma area are videotaped for quality control.) “It’s better if I don’t know.”. One of the cops, a large man with a buzzcut, got Goldberg’s attention by saying, “Doc.”. Whether you're planning a simple kitchen spruce-up or a complete overhaul, deciding what to do about your cabinetry is one of the biggest decisions you'll make. At first it surprised her that people saw her that way, but she realized it captured something true. A big, energetic guy with glasses and a master’s degree in applied positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, Charles has been working to reduce youth violence since 1988. sitting in one of Philadelphia’s toughest neighborhoods, Temple was the perfect match for a coach who prided himself on helping players turn their basketball skills into college degrees. That stuck with me. He lowered the coat. Over my years of reporting here, I had heard stories about Temple’s trauma team. Often when Goldberg meets a shooting victim, it turns out she once treated a sibling, parent, cousin or friend. “Because I thought I knew. The price of survival is often lasting disability. Some of his students from North Philly started collecting the stories of families who had lost children to gun violence, which is how Charles made the connection to Goldberg—Temple had treated one of the victims, Lamont Adams, a 16-year-old from North Philly who was shot and killed in 2004 after a false rumor was allegedly spread about him. The crust of snow on the sidewalks would soon melt, the days would lengthen, people would leave their houses to enjoy the weather. “They’re so angry,” Goldberg said. “I probably need 10 of them, five on each hand.”, The major non-running events in her life tend to be awards ceremonies. I asked her what changes in gun violence she had seen in her 30 years. Stadium, Arena & Sports Venue. Goldberg listened as a senior resident informed the boy’s mother. But the reality is that people get shot and then they are going to survive, because trauma surgeons are going to save them, and that’s when the real suffering begins. Goldberg attended to the patients in the trauma unit. “Him being a freshman, we told him just make … It is so miraculous.” Surgery, for Goldberg, was a way of honoring the miracle. And he said, God and the Devil were with me.” Goldberg thought that was perfect. We’re so sorry. “These crossing bullets are just so challenging,” she said. The letters were surrounded by gold stars. His photography has appeared in the New York Times, Pitchfork, Esquire, NPR, Time Out and TruTV. Goldberg reached out and held his left hand in her hand while telling him what organs he’d lost. Low 57F. Thomas started off the season hot but has dipped lately in scoring, averaging 14.5 ppg over the Bearcats losing streak. They get psychological counseling for any PTSD symptoms, as well as case management services to help them get high-school diplomas or jobs. He pulled his coat up over his mangled face and walked to the ER of one of Temple’s sister hospitals, approaching a nurse. She tapped lightly on the patient’s left forearm with one hand. Temple has also created an intervention component, called Turning Point, where shooting victims get extra counseling while they’re still in the hospital. She grew up in the quiet Philadelphia suburb of Broomall. She went on to study psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. Recently, Charles has also become a sort of Johnny Appleseed of gun locks, handing them out to parents who want to keep their children from getting hurt in accidents. If you think of Broad as the city’s spinal column, the hospital is about level with the heart. “And then of course the third time he came in, he was shot through the head, and he was dead,” Goldberg said. She was the only Bearcat to convert from long range. A patient comes in unconscious, maybe in cardiac arrest, and Goldberg has to get into the cavity to see what is going on. If the heart has stopped, she can try to get it beating again. Goldberg has always found the senselessness of violence frustrating, and when she was promoted to chief of trauma 15 years ago, she started thinking about how to engineer some control, to help patients “above and beyond just being a trauma surgeon.” She imagined a comprehensive approach to prevent shootings and keep patients from showing up in a trauma bay in the first place. Stand on the sidewalk outside the hospital and look south on a clear day and you can see the pale marble and granite of City Hall, about 4 miles away, near Philly’s pelvis. It’s a metal rod with a sharp blade on one end that hooks under the breastbone. Each time I went to the hospital, I asked Goldberg what else was going on with her aside from work. Visualization. Turning Point was initially controversial within the hospital. The senior was only able to put up eight points on 3-8 shooting, tying her season low in attempts, despite leading the conference with an average of 23.1 ppg. I had arranged to stay and observe for 24 hours, accompanied every moment by Walter, who carried a trauma pager and a yellow folder of consent forms. And that’s true for pro-gun people also.”. Another student recalled being surprised when a patient asked for his business card even though he was just a lowly medical student. Fourteen dead in San Bernardino, six in Michigan, 11 over one weekend in Chicago. The following morning the trauma pager blew up. A few years ago, the store stopped carrying Sweet‘N Low so she bought a box and left it there; they keep it under the counter for her. And that is how you have to build a good system, believe it or not. Logan Lusk is a communications major with certificates in journalism and creative writing. But together, maybe, we can give perfect care.”. Charles shows them the video. A lack of pain could indicate a hidden injury. His assailant was brought in too, in handcuffs, a white-haired man in a red T-shirt, his left eye bloodied and swollen shut. His friends bolted. The nurse thought to herself what you might expect a person to think in such a situation: “Daaaaaamn.” He was stabilized, then transferred to Temple. “The highs and the lows, to stay even-keeled,” she said. Goldberg wheeled the monitor over to show me the X-ray image: paper clip and bullet. The Devil. There were days when the doctors were so busy with fresh traumas that they didn’t make rounds until 7 or 8 at night. Partly cloudy early followed by cloudy skies overnight. And trauma surgery was the ultimate form of appreciation, because a surgeon in trauma experienced so much variety. Temple had three players contribute more than fifteen points to the Bearcats one, as freshman Jasha Clinton (17 points), Alexa Williamson (21 points) and Mia Davis (17 points) proved too much for Cincinnati to handle. But she also asked the students to share their experiences with patients and their feelings about those cases. “They would say, ‘Yeah, it was a busy day.’ I’d be like, ‘Yeah, I heard.’”. They didn’t care. It’s a jinx thing.”, Goldberg is superstitious. There was a laceration above his right eye and a small amount of blood on the sheets near his head. Hurts them and hurts her. And you just plow ahead and plow ahead and plow ahead. However, the loss to Temple did see a couple Bearcats turn in standout performances. There are three programs aimed at preventing violence before it happens. He shook his head. Chaney arrived at Temple before the 1982-83 season. “As a country,” Goldberg said, “we lost our teachable moment.” She started talking about the 2012 murder of 20 schoolchildren and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. One group gets typical care and the other gets Turning Point, and then patients in both groups answer a questionnaire that quantifies attitudes toward violence. Head coach Michelle Clark-Heard, whose first two seasons with the program were successful, has not enjoyed similar success with her team this season. You’ve done a great job. Goldberg and her team have needed to gather data about questions that have never been rigorously answered, a common situation when it comes to gun violence. But she didn’t have the authority yet. And the miner that had the hardest time down there was the youngest guy. I followed Goldberg to the ER, and she disappeared behind a windowless set of double doors, into the trauma resuscitation area. “Who was going to get in her way?”. We’re gonna be here, and then you know what, we’re still gonna be here. Breaking it down has involved doing science. “It’s pink,” she told me once. Goldberg hosted a tour for Charles and his students, inviting them into the trauma unit and explaining what gun patients experience there. “Do I need to be on call? One of the speakers at the investiture called Goldberg a “realistic idealist,” and when I saw her later, she said she’d been thinking about the phrase. Cincinnati remains at the bottom three in the AAC standings and next heads to New Orleans to face Tulane University on Feb. 7 at 3 p.m. “It’s a miracle,” she told me. It’s called the Philadelphia Immediate Transport in Penetrating Trauma Trial (PIPT), an elaborate undertaking that has involved close coordination with emergency personnel and also dozens of community meetings where doctors explained how the study works (over the next five years, some victims of penetrating trauma will receive immediate transport and some won’t) and how people can opt out of the study (by wearing a special wristband). College & University. The rule was that I could observe a surgery if the patient or a family member consented, and if I wanted to do an interview, the patient had to sign a form. Surgeons had needed to remove one of his kidneys, his spleen and part of his stomach to repair the damage of the bullet and save his life. And sometimes there’s a big guy you’ll hear, and it’s the echo—the sound that comes out of the room. For most of her career, she has stopped at the same Dunkin’ Donuts to order a large coffee with cream and two Sweet‘N Lows. I arranged to return and shadow her again on her next shift, in two days. She’s been wearing the same style of tan Timberlands for 15 years; her current pair, given to her by a colleague when she became chair of surgery, has the Temple logo inked on the heels. Powered by the Localist Community Event Platform Goldberg took off her latex gloves and threw them in a biohazard trash can. He spoke Spanish. There’s some times when it doesn’t affect me, and there are some times when it makes my knees shake, when I know what’s going on in there.”. The trauma area is a rectangular room with three bays, each of which can accommodate two patients side by side when it’s busy. As Jeremy Walter, Temple Hospital’s amiable director of media relations, reminded me more than once, “Temple isn’t just a hospital that treats drug addicts and gun victims.” Still, it was founded 125 years ago by a Samaritan to provide free care, and that public-service mission persists. Another had been stabbed in the abdomen during a fight. Davis remains the second-leading scorer in the conference behind Thomas, with an average of 18.8 ppg. One student spoke about stitching together the chest of a young shooting victim who had died after surgeons attempted to resuscitate him in the trauma area; the student’s first thought was that he was excited to practice stitching a chest, then he felt guilty for being excited. The game will be streamed on ESPN+. LEVEL 1 SECOND GSW MALE. “I’m troubled by that.”. Is it in the chest? The university … She had to amputate the woman’s legs to save her life. In a perverse way, the more efficiently Goldberg does her job inside the hospital, the more invisible gun violence becomes everywhere else. For more stories that stay with you, subscribe to our newsletter. They come in talking. The most dangerous wounds don’t always look the worst. Even though Amy Goldberg has been treating gun patients for 30 years, the sense of horror has never completely gone away. We get names, places, anguished Facebook posts, wonky articles full of statistics on crime rates and risk, Twitter arguments about the Second Amendment—everything except the blood, the pictures of bodies torn by bullets. “Billie Jean” played at low volume from a tinny speaker. LEVEL 1 PED, it said—a pedestrian struck by a car. You have permission to edit this article. Rafi Colon in his stairwell at home. So Temple launched one. “That’s what I had been searching for, for years, in how you feel in the operating room. He messed with them once by asking a buddy to get him a Rita’s water ice, Philadelphia’s version of a snow cone. “It became second nature,” he told me recently over lunch at a Panera Bread in the Philly suburbs. “You don’t need your spleen. Get the latest news and information for the Temple Owls. Some of the surgeon’s tools look like things you’d buy at Home Depot. For instance, when a paramedic first finds a gun or stabbing victim, nobody knows if it’s better to administer IV fluids and put a tube down the victim’s throat on the spot, or if the medic should simply race the victim to the hospital. The University of Cincinnati women’s basketball team fell to Temple University 53-69 on Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2021 at Fifth Third Arena in Cincinnati. The patient’s vital signs appeared stable but Goldberg was worried about internal bleeding. But there’s nothing that can prepare you.”. Temple asks the patients if they want to talk to a trauma survivor. The Bearcats went just 21-62 on the night and lacked long-range for much of the night. Goldberg said she saw a movie a few years ago that captures what it’s like to operate under these conditions. The action-movie hero is shot in the stomach; he limps to a safe house; he takes off his shirt, removes the bullet with a tweezer, and now he is better. Shot. Some doctors thought it was cruel to show patients videos of their own surgeries, especially patients who had done nothing wrong. Why did you have such a hard time? And then we’re still here. Redshirt senior Arame Niang submitted her second double-double on the season, tallying 10 points and a season-high 16 rebounds on the night. She just didn’t expect it to change anything. A window looked into the bay next door that held the CT scanner. The key distinction for Goldberg isn’t innocent or guilty, it’s rational or irrational. Breathing. Talking to patients seemed to energize Goldberg. Goldberg said that if people had been shown the autopsy photos of the kids, the gun debate would have been transformed. The last time I saw Goldberg, I was eating breakfast in the hospital’s basement cafeteria, one corridor away from the morgue where bodies are kept, pending transport. The patients were uniformly docile and tired. The arm was broken. “No dolor?” she asked in Spanish. “It wasn’t like a gruesome thing.” The holes in his intestines leaked stomach acid and burned away the surrounding tissues and skin, leaving less skin available to eventually stretch over the wound and close it. She looked at him. The officer asked what the police should put down in their report for the patient’s condition. In a perverse way, the more efficiently Goldberg does her job inside the hospital, the more invisible gun violence becomes everywhere else. Her religious faith is still strong—it’s not that she goes around talking about it, she told me, it’s just that she has worked for 30 years in trauma and seen a lot of death, and it’s hard to do that and not feel something about God. On days when she’s on call, she shaves her legs. It was at the end of a relatively quiet overnight call shift in late March. She lives alone in an apartment in Center City. As she once put it to me, “One of us can’t give perfect care. The trauma pager buzzed shortly after noon. He’d ask the doctors, how many yesterday, was it 17? Gun violence is irrational, there’s no pattern to it. You can feel the bones rubbing together.” The CT scan showed some clotted blood in the patient’s head, appearing on the screen as patches of white. It motivates no law. He held out a trembling left hand and smiled. Will worked in hospital photography and public affairs in Brooklyn for five years. The senselessness made her so angry. Temple sees 2,500 to 3,000 traumas per year, around 450 of which were gunshot wounds in 2016. “They interviewed them all. “But luckily, God gave us two.”, He nodded slightly. On his chest. “We will miss you,” Goldberg said, “but there comes a day.”. Goldberg didn’t know much about guns or gun violence until she got to Temple. Let’s try to educate,” she said. There were two large men inside the room in T-shirts and shorts. “I’m a family doctor, a little bit, because I’ve been here so long,” she said. Then you’re working. Towson University events, updated every day. “‘Am I gonna die? Gladeye is a digital innovations agency in New Zealand and New York. Goldberg told the man he was scheduled to be released the following Monday. “The creation of a person, you know. “I’m sorry,” the resident said, “he has passed.” The mother didn’t react; she didn’t seem to understand what she had just heard. “I don’t want to know,” she said. Which is why she pours so much of herself into the outreach programs, the scientific studies and any other method she has of finding control and making the problem visible. It seemed like the busiest times were Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. She assumed they were his family, but when she entered, the men rushed over to her and said that the patient was a suspected shooter himself. Charles also runs the Fighting Chance program, a series of training sessions for community members, where doctors show people in neighborhoods how to give first aid to gunshot victims, to apply tourniquets and stop blood loss in the seconds immediately following a shooting, before the EMTs or police arrive. Her medical training was all about learning to operate, to recognize the kinds of patterns that she now teaches to students and young doctors. This may involve open cardiac massage—literally holding the heart in her hands and massaging it to get blood flowing up to the brain again. The Owls made sure to take advantage, collecting 19 points from the free-throw line. “The fact that not a single one of those kids was able to be transported to a hospital, tells me that they were not just dead, but really really really really dead. He died.” It was a lesson: Be direct. She told him she’d create a new outreach position for him at Temple, that she’d get up “in people’s faces” until she made sure it happened. Spring was coming, and the shootings would pick back up. He looked young. Winds SSW at 10 to 20 mph. The trauma unit at Temple University Hospital, in a rare moment of calm. 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