Being Prepared

After the bombing at the Boston Marathon on 4/15/13, plus the explosion at West and the ricin envelopes in DC, it's become more obvious than ever that no place is truly safe. At lunch yesterday I asked one of the emergency medicine docs if Austin was prepared for mass casualties (it's no longer far-fetched to think that someone may drop a bomb in the middle of SXSW someday), and he said yes. Apparently they run mass casualty drills once a year, and he recalled that when Hurricane Katrina hit, many patients from coastal hospitals were evacuated to Austin. I forget how many people he was able to triage in ___ hours, but it was done. He also commented that if anyone really wanted to do serious damage to Austin, then the football stadium at UT on any home game day would a prime target. Thousands of defenseless people in one spot, they'd be sitting ducks. Whereas at SXSW, everyone was all spread out. And of course UT is always a target; wasn't there already a shooting there in the 60s?

There are many runners at my hospital (one of my partners ran the Boston marathon years ago), so the bombings have been a hot topic here. I know a guy who is a surgery resident at one of Harvard's teaching hospitals, and he commented that he's been treating some of the victims from the bombing. I don't dare ask for details, but I imagine it must be hard being on the front lines, seeing the damage the bombs caused to these patients, trying to fix them up. What can an internist do in such a situation? I once admitted a patient for chest pain after her house caught on fire and her husband died in the fire (back in Philly), but that seems tame compared to what's going on now.

I certainly hope that I'll never have to encounter an event with mass casualties in my lifetime, but if I do, I would be out there helping others, just as we were taught (and called) to do. It's our duty as physicians.