Chapter 7 Call Me Doctor

Chapter 7

Call Me Doctor

Pivotal moments in life, and especially in tactical operations, fall in place at our feet like beautifully wrapped packages from Heaven, and the one in front of me was adorned with an enormous red bow.

I grabbed Gator’s arm. “Get the kit from the truck and call me Doctor.”

Clark Johnson taught me more than anyone else by dragging me into situations no one really wanted to encounter, and it had become my turn to pass that wisdom and knowledge on to the next generation. Gator and I were more alike than anyone could imagine, but his bank of experience was just as empty as mine had been fifteen years before.

By the time I slid to a stop on one knee beside the bloody, convulsing body in the middle of the road, my assessment of the scene was well underway. His chest was rising and falling, and that was a good sign, but his feet were pointed sharply downward. The neurological symptoms would come into play several steps down the checklist, but the immediate concerns were ensuring airway, breathing, and circulation. The rise and fall of his chest took care of the first two, and a pair of fingers on the man’s wrist, coupled with the blood flowing from his head, covered circulation.

Gator dropped the med kit beside me. “What do you need, Doctor?”

At the sound of the revered title, the circled crowd subconsciously took a step backward to give me room to work. Although I’d never be a medical doctor, I had enough battlefield medical training to likely keep the young man alive long enough to put him into the hands of the help he truly required.

I extended a hand. “C-collar.”

Gator placed the device in my palm, and I carefully situated it around the victim’s neck and secured the Velcro strap. With his neck and spine protected, I said, “Large-bore IV.”

Gator pulled an IV bag of saline from the kit and laid a catheter and needle in my hand. As I felt for a vein, Gator applied layers of dressing to the head wounds caused by the flying cinderblock. Once the catheter was in place, I connected the bag of fluid and pointed toward the cleanest man in the gathered crowd. “You! Come here.”

He lunged forward, and I stuck the bag in his hand. “Hold this and keep it above your belt, but don’t squeeze it.”

He took the bag. “Whatever you say, Doctor. Is he alive?”

I ignored the question, mostly for dramatic effect. The man wasn’t going to die from his wounds, but his condition was serious enough to require a good trauma team in a good hospital, and from what I saw, no such facility existed in Terrebonne Parish.

With the ABCs done, it was time for triage. I pulled open one eyelid at a time and studied the pupils. What I saw wasn’t good. They were dilated to at least twice the size they should’ve been, and they showed no reaction to my penlight. His convulsions slowed until he finally lay still on his back, but his feet were still pointed downward at an extremely unnatural position.

Convinced he was stable enough to transport, I looked up. “I need something I can use as a backboard. Anything that’s six feet long and flat will work.”

A man appeared with a table from inside the restaurant. “How ’bout dis here?”

I patted the ground beside the victim. “Perfect. Rip off the legs and lay it down here.”

With Gator’s help, I strapped the unconscious man onto the table and loaded him into the bed of our rented truck. I closed the tailgate and climbed into the truck bed. “Does anybody know this guy well?”

A small man in a grimy Chevron Oil hat leaned around the people in front of him. “Yeah, I know him. He’s my brother.”

“Get in,” I said.

Gator leaned over the sidewall of the truck. “Where are we going?”

“Get us to the airport, double-quick.”

He leapt behind the wheel, and in seconds, we were making well over sixty miles per hour and leaving a cloud of dust in our wake.

“What’s your name?” I asked the man.

“Billy. Is he gonna be all right?”

“Nice to meet you, Billy. I’m Chase. If we can get him to the hospital in New Orleans fast enough, he should survive.”

“New Orleans?” Billy almost yelled. “That’s over an hour.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll get him there in no time. What’s your brother’s name?”

“Cory.”

“Last name?”

He said, “Campbell. Cory Campbell. He just turned twenty-one.”

I wrote his name and age on the pad from the med kit. “Does he have any medical conditions?”

“Yeah, his head is busted open!”

“We’re managing his injuries. I need to know if he has any preexisting conditions.”

He shook his head. “No, he’s twenty-one. He ain’t got no medical conditions.”

“How about an address?” I asked.

He gave me the information, and I added it to the notes.

“Do you have any idea what the fight was about?”

He looked away as the wind in the bed of the truck threatened to yank his hat from his head.

I spoke louder. “What was the fight about?”

“Why does that matter?”

“The police are going to ask, so I’d like to be able to tell them what happened.”

“He got his ass beat for messing with the wrong guy’s daughter. That’s what happened. I told him to leave that girl alone, but he’s stubborn as a stump.”

I ran through another status check on Cory and then asked, “So, it was a fight over a girl?”

Billy said, “Yeah. Me and Cory work the Chevron Genesis rig offshore, and there’s a Cajun girl in the office named Sammi. She’s trouble, but she’s sure-nuff something to look at. All the guys… Aww, never mind. Anyway, the guy who did this to my brother, he’s Sammi’s daddy.”

“Does he work the rig, too?”

“He did before he got hurt, but he’s on disability now.”

“Disability?” I asked. “He didn’t look disabled to me.”

“You should’ve seen him before the accident.”

I had ignored my patient long enough, so I connected a second bag of fluid when the first one ran dry, and I double-checked his vitals. “He’s going to be all right, Billy. I’m sure he has a concussion, but hopefully not a TBI.”

He cocked his head and studied his unconscious brother. “TBI?”

“Yes, a traumatic brain injury. He’s showing some signs, but the doctors should be able to rule that out after some tests at the hospital.”

“Doctors?” he said. “But you’re his doctor.”

I shook my head. “I’m not that kind of doctor. Cory will be under the care of a neurosurgeon when we get him to the hospital.”

“He’ll have to have surgery?”

“We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Right now, we need to focus on keeping him stable and getting him to the hospital as quickly as possible.”

He said, “Chevron has a bunch of helicopters. Maybe we could get one of them.”

Gator pulled us through the gate and onto the parking apron at the airport, and I pointed toward the Caravan. “We’ve got that.”

Billy grinned, and we carried Cory from the bed of the truck and up the ladder into the cabin of the plane.

Gator took a knee beside me on the floor. “I’ve got him from here.”

I parked Billy in a seat, and he buckled his belt. “Are you a doctor, too?”

Gator shook his head, but instead of sticking around to hear his answer, I hopped into the left seat and spun up the turbine. I leveled off at twenty-five hundred feet, headed straight for downtown New Orleans.

Leaning into the aisle, I asked, “Is everything all right back there?”

Gator said, “He’s convulsing again, but not too bad.”

“Keep him on the backboard, and don’t let him hurt himself. I need you to get East Jefferson ER on the phone and give them Cory’s info. Tell them we’ll land in the canal in less than fifteen minutes.”

Gator looked up. “The canal?”

“Yeah, there’s a big canal right beside the ER.”

He stared at me with a look of disbelief, so I snapped my fingers. “Make the call.”

He yanked his phone from his pocket, and I turned my attention back to flying the airplane.

My curiosity drew my eyes back into the cabin, where Gator knelt with his phone pressed to the side of his face. I couldn’t hear the conversation, but I could imagine what the nurse on the other end of the line was about to say.

Gator covered the phone with a hand and yelled, “They say you can’t land in the canal. They want us to land at the airport, and they’ll have an ambulance meet us there.”

“Tell them to get a gurney and a team of orderlies to the canal. We’ll splash down in less than five minutes.”

Gator might’ve been the new guy, but given the choice between picking a fight with me six feet away or a nurse on the phone, he’d go to war with the nurse every time.

The Louis Armstrong International Airport Class B airspace began at six hundred feet above Lake Pontchartrain, so I maneuvered the Caravan beneath the floor of the airspace to avoid an uncomfortable conversation with air traffic control. Thankfully, the wind was out of the south, so my approach over the lake would end in a nice, slow splashdown in the canal that was never intended to be used by a seaplane piloted by a covert operator with a concussion victim lying in the passenger compartment.

I flew over the canal gate at the north end of the waterway at less than a hundred feet and stared down a long, straight stretch of canal that was only slightly wider than the Caravan’s wingspan. Precision flying in a low, lumbering, bulky airplane was akin to one of the Flying Wallendas walking a tightrope a thousand feet above the Earth. Clipping a wingtip on a light pole, fence, or the embankment on either side would spell disaster. Just like the Wallendas, there was no room for error and no safety net.

The wind on the nose stabilized the approach and lowered our groundspeed, but the lower I descended, the less consistent that wind was. The buildings of downtown caused the breeze to swirl and dance, leaving me doing a dance of my own with both feet on the rudder pedals, one hand on the yoke, and one on the throttle. The touchdown wasn’t graceful, but it was perfectly positioned. The floats slid across the surface until I pulled the power to idle and flattened the propeller. We drifted to a stop, pointing south, with the hospital off our right wingtip. If the engineers at Cessna had chosen to put a passenger compartment door on the starboard side of the 208, my maneuvering would’ve been complete, but in their infinite wisdom, they left out that particular door. Their oversight meant I had to make a 180-degree turn in the canal to position the port side of the plane against the bank of the canal on the hospital side.

I lowered the water rudders and directed us toward the eastern bank as far as we could go without running aground. The wind from the south would do its best to weathervane the Caravan, keeping her tail pointed northward, but I had no choice but to force the plane into the turn. It took a lot of power and all the right rudder the plane possessed, but I finally completed the maneuver and brushed the portside pontoon against the bank of the canal.

Four orderlies descended the bank, dragging a backboard down the slope. As I stepped from the cockpit and climbed down the ladder, two of the orderlies climbed the stern ladder and made their way into the cabin. Digging my heels into the grassy embankment, I held the shoreline tightly to keep the Caravan from drifting away.

Gator followed the orderlies down the stairs, helping them carry Cory Campbell strapped to the broken tabletop. As they stepped from the pontoon and onto the slope, my partner gave me a thumbs-up, and I said, “I’ll meet you in the ER ASAP.”

He glanced between me and the Caravan. “Are you leaving the plane here?”

I curled a finger, summoning him to leave Cory with the orderlies. He followed my command and joined me on the bank.

I said, “We can’t leave her here. I’ll take it to Lakefront Airport about a mile east and grab a cab. I want you to stay with Billy, and don’t let him out of your sight. He’s our best shot at figuring out what’s going on in that bayou, and he owes us a favor.”