By Steve Stone
The Virginian-Pilot(Norfolk, VA.)
Copyright 2007 Landmark Communications, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
NORFOLK, Va. — Larry Saunders had given up.
Tended by paramedics whose harried words confirmed his fears, the Gloucester man felt life draining away after a horrific accident.
“I remember laying there saying a short prayer and saying goodbye to my family,” Saunders said.
Then Nightingale landed. “I saw this warm, smiling face with a helmet on,” Saunders said.
Flight paramedic Jim Laing “leaned over and started talking to me . ... You can sense confidence in a person’s voice, and he just turned around my thinking 180 degrees .
“From that moment on,” Saunders said, “I knew I was going to make it.”
He became a statistic - a good one - as one of more than 14,000 people who have been sped to medical care by Nightingale since the aeromedical ambulance service began flying 25 years ago from what is now Sentara Norfolk General Hospital.
At 11 a.m. Tuesday , Nightingale’s achievements will be marked at an invitation-only celebration at the Sentara Williamsburg Regional Medical Center .
“If Nightingale is ever compromised in any way, God be with the accident victims,” Saunders said, “because they are more likely to end up as fatalities.”
Like so many Nightingale passengers, Saunders had no idea an hour earlier that death was imminent.
It was Jan. 10, 2004. “A Saturday,” he remembered. “I was working around my home with a tractor and an auger, setting some fence posts.”
He had just centered the auger and started it swiftly spinning to dig a new hole when it lurched, having apparently hit a root. “I threw my arm up to block my head from being hit and it caught my glove. It pulled me right in.”
Suddenly, “I was spinning around and around,” Saunders said . “I could hear my bones breaking.”
His wife, Susan, who died in July, happened to be watching from the kitchen window and ran outside, alerting their two sons. Jason and Matthew Saunders shut down the auger and used their belts as tourniquets on their father’s thighs to stem the bleeding.
Paramedics arrived in a few minutes.
“Your hearing is supersensitive at times like that,” Saunders said. “I just knew by listening to them that I was not going to make it.”
They ticked off a grim laundry list of injuries as they called for Nightingale. One leg severed, the other mangled; a collapsed lung; a crushed arm; a mauled back.
Aboard Nightingale, however, Laing kept Saunders’ attention and boosted his morale.
“He said, ‘We’ve got one of the best trauma units waiting just for you when we get over to Norfolk General. Don’t worry,'\" Saunders said.
After weeks of intensive care, seven surgeries and months of rehabilitation, the former Marine Corps pilot is not only walking again with a prosthetic, but also back to flying small planes, including his Cessna.
He credits everyone who helped him - his family, the ground crews, the surgeons and medical staff - for his survival and recovery.
But especially Nightingale .
The air ambulance and its crew have many loyal friends .
Since its inception, Nightingale has carried some 14,400 patients, said Chris Cannon, 39, Nightingale’s manager and one of its flight nurses.
All without an accident or major incident.
“Our successes are those of a whole team system of which we are just one part,” Cannon said, including the emergency personnel who first arrive on a call and medical teams at the hospitals.
Three different helicopters have been called Nightingale over the years; the most recent came on line in 1996.
Today’s chopper “is a flying critical care unit,” Cannon said, able to handle most any patient, irrespective of malady.
Each flight crew includes a pilot, nurse and paramedic.
Cannon said the paramedics typically have at least a decade of experience “that brings the strength of working in the field in accident scenes .”
Nurses come from the hospital environment, often with experience in critical care .
“You combine the two and it really fits most of the flights we do,” Cannon said, “whether we are going to scenes or doing hospital transfers.”
While Nightingale serves a 125-mile radius, its core includes all of Hampton Roads, the Eastern Shore , areas west to Williamsburg and Franklin, and the Outer Banks .
The popular perception is that most Nightingale flights are to the scenes of terrible wrecks, fires or crime scenes.
“That’s part of it,” Cannon said , but increasingly, patients are not suffering from violent trauma but are facing equally life-threatening medical situations.
About 55 percent of Nightingale’s flights are for non trauma cases.
“It could be your neighbor with a heart problem or your relative down the street who is having a problem with her high-risk pregnancy,” Cannon said.
Programs such as Nightingale’s have their critics. Some question whether the costs are justified and argue that only some patients truly benefit from air transport, that many could have had the same outcome if they had been carried by traditional ground ambulance.
It’s true that Nightingale isn’t a money maker. It loses about $1.5 million annually for Sentara, said Dale Gauding, a Sentara spokesman.
But money is not the primary focus, Cannon said.
“We are as fiscally responsible as we can be,” he said. " ... This is an important community service.”
It doesn’t serve only Sentara. As if to underline that, its very first flight on Feb. 25, 1982, was from Virginia Beach General Hospital, then not part of Sentara, to Portsmouth Naval Hospital with an intra-cranial bleeding case.
While the key benefit of Nightingale is its ability to move patients quickly, safety is the first rule. “This is a helicopter first and it’s ambulance second,” said Cameron Ebel, 53 , a Nightingale pilot.
Ebel earned his wings as an Army helicopter pilot. He joined Nightingale in 1985 and has made more than 3,000 flights.
“As pilots, we don’t really need to know or want to know” what is going on in the patient area during a flight, Ebel said. “Our main focus is to get from point A to point B ... safely.”
His most memorable day came in May 1986, when 14 cars of a vintage Norfolk & Western passenger train, the “Old 611,” derailed along the Great Dismal Swamp, injuring 200 people, several seriously. Nightingale made three flights to the scene, ferrying the most critically injured to Norfolk General.
The remote location, seven miles from the nearest road, underlined the value of the helicopter in reaching patients on scene.
“We landed the helicopter with the landing gear spanning the railroad tracks,” he said.
Jim Elliott, 54, has been a flight paramedic since Nightingale’s first year.
“There weren’t a whole lot of people doing it then,” he said. “It’s been amazing to watch how many other programs have grown.”
The public is invited on Tuesday to Sentara in Williamsburg to see the helicopter and meet some of its crew from noon to 2 p.m.
The attendance of the guest of honor, though, depends on “operational needs.”
If there’s a call for help, Nightingale will fly.