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A paramedic entered the car, and another took a protesting Pennington away. “Her blood was all over my face, so they thought I was badly injured, and I shook so badly they thought I was in shock,” she says. “I begged them to land a helicopter there to take her to the trauma center, but they drove us all to a hospital ER. An hour later, while I was in X-ray, LifeFlight took her out.”

Initially, Caitlin was on a ventilator and heavily medicated; it was days before she had surgery, eventually followed by months of rehabilitation. “We’re blessed to even have her,” Pennington says. Although Caitlin has come far since the Dec. 18, 2003, accident, the brain shearing during her traumatic brain injury left her without taste or smell and with short-term memory loss.

“Not every woman can give life to a child more than once,” Pennington says. “Maybe my destiny was to be a nurse because it allowed me to save my daughter.”

Applying nursing skills

Like other New Orleans residents, Deborah Johnson, RN, BSN, is choosy about which nightly parade to watch the week before Mardi Gras.

In 2003, some colleagues and Johnson chose the parade that took place Feb. 18. She is the hospital information systems assistant director (and occasional pediatric staff nurse) at that city’s Tulane University Hospital & Clinic.

The parade had just begun when they heard gunshots 25 feet away, where they had stood moments before. With nowhere to run, the huge crowd fell to the ground. “I can still hear the rhythm of those two guns emptying,” Johnson says. Turning, she saw several teens fleeing, one with a gun. Instead of running away from the scene, she ran toward it to see what she could do. After tripping on streetcar tracks and injuring her head, she found the victims and a police officer.

“My main thought was for him to find other health workers for more help, and some did [come to help],” Johnson says. While the others tended the three other victims, Johnson assessed a young woman. “She was hit in the upper thigh, bleeding quite a bit, hysterical, and very panicky because she didn’t know what happened,” Johnson says. Since it wasn’t arterial bleeding, she ignored suggestions to apply a tourniquet and instead used a jacket to apply pressure. “You try to limit blood exposure, but don’t not apply pressure because of it,” she says. She was so focused that until ambulances arrived, she didn’t notice the police had moved spectators, taken pictures, and put up crime scene tape.

Her service wasn’t over. Afraid of retaliation, no witnesses had surfaced. “Despite my own fears, I wanted to be a model for others,” she says. “Sometimes nobody will be first or stand alone. After I told police I saw one gunman, several witnesses came forward and identified others.”

The police soon caught the suspects, and the witnesses stayed inside a police car while identifying which teens shot into the crowd. “I would do it again. ... We have to be that way,” Johnson says of her actions. “Sometimes all that’s needed to help a person through is to hold their hand and offer support, but nursing gives you a lot of skills in problem-solving and intervention. You just have to apply them.”

Providing support and calm

Driving home on the thruway from a spiritual retreat, Janet Hansraj, RN, BSN, saw a car overturned in the ditch. She gathered up her silk sari and scrambled down the 3-foot embankment. The driver, who had been thrown clear, told her there were other victims. One was so muddied and bloody that Hansraj couldn’t tell “if he was white, black, or green.” Another, bleeding, was walking in traffic, so Hansraj told approaching spectators to hold him because he was in shock. A fourth was trapped under the car.

“Gas was spilled all over — you could see and smell it everywhere,” she says. “People were screaming at me to get away before it blew up. But I couldn’t live with myself if I stood by.”

Hansraj told those who didn’t want to help to leave, said someone should call 911 for three ambulances, and asked for T-shirts to stanch the blood and volunteers to lift. A tattooed motorcyclist, another man, and a tiny woman clambered down to help. “I showed them how to logroll and lift the boy, while I supported his head,” she says. “He was almost scalped, and his ear was hanging into my hand, so I wrapped his head. He was semiconscious, not breathing. We had to keep him aligned while we walked up the bank and put him onto the pavement. I kept telling him, “You will live. You’ll be fine,” even though she doubted he’d survive his burns, fractures, and critical injuries.

When the petite woman mentioned she’d like to become a nurse, Hansraj said, “Start learning now by holding his head and talking to him while I triage the others.” Once the ambulances arrived, she gave a report, then went to dinner with friends. “I didn’t go to the hospital because I couldn’t help him anymore, and his death would be such a loss,” she says.

Hansraj, a telemetry/critical care nurse at Pascack Valley Hospital, Westwood, N.J., was working one day when the director of nurses asked for her help in identifying the nurse who saved a caller’s son’s life on the thruway two weeks before.

“I was so happy he was alive, and by his full recovery four weeks later,” Hansraj says. “His mom said that since I saved his life, now I was his mother, too.” She’s attended his graduation party and family dinners, and keeps his photo with her children’s on their family shrine. “Nurses must provide support and calm for all patients,” she says. “Our inner self must be at peace so we can help others.”

Stepping forward

On July 3, 2003, Joanna Kenney, RN, CRRN, was at an independent living facility when it was hit by lightning from a fast-moving storm. The building shook and fire alarms clanged, so Kenney, a clinical supervisor for Provena Care @ Home, Elgin, Ill., was checking on residents when she learned a construction worker was injured.

The facility was being built in three phases, and the newest was just an outer shell with some interior framing. Kenney climbed three flights of open, sideless, wood-frame stairs, then crossed 250 feet of plywood flooring full of dust and hanging plastic to the roughed-out balcony frame, where the victim lay in the pouring rain.

Because she hadn’t worked in the ED or ICU, she says, “I didn’t know how bad it was. But his face, lips, and tongue were blue, and his tongue protruded. I checked his carotid, and he did have a pulse. Since it was two days after [Chicago’s] Wrigley Field porches collapsed, I realized I couldn’t go out [to where he lay] because it would be too much weight with two other men there. One was talking to 911, so we asked if we could move him.”

As they moved him inside, she saw the back of his shirt smoldering, so she pulled it aside and stomped out the fire. She sent someone to the on-site CNA, Lindsay Frisbie, for the facility’s CPR mask.

“Since it’s independent living, our only equipment was that mask. There was no crash cart or emergency team — we were the team,” she says. “I lost his brachial and carotid pulses and started CPR.”

Since Frisbie was out of breath from running up and down nine flights of stairs, she took over compressions while Kenney provided rescue breathing. “It seemed like forever, but could have been five minutes” by the time rescuers arrived to intubate the victim and transport him to a burn unit.

“They sent us out because it was so hot and there was no ventilation or moving air,” says Kenney. “We walked downstairs in a fog, then watched the news to see what happened to him. A week later, we learned that he was OK and being treated for burns from his brother-in-law, who came to thank us.”