By Sarah Lemagie
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN)
Copyright 2007 Star Tribune
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News
With a stomach-lurching swoop, the ambulance helicopter landed next to a cluster of emergency vehicles parked outside an industrial building in Independence. On board was a North Memorial Air Care crew called from Lakeville to airlift Seth Lord, a 29-year-old welder who had been crushed by a 2,700-pound steel beam.
Paramedic Dan Hendricks leaped out and helped firefighters and other first responders carry Lord, conscious but grimacing, under the still-whirring blades of the helicopter. Lord had pelvic injuries that required fast transport to the nearest trauma hospital — in this case, North Memorial in Robbinsdale.
Just 20 minutes earlier and 35 miles southeast, Hendricks and flight nurse Eric Thoerner had been at an airport Christmas potluck when the call came from dispatch in Brooklyn Center: three melodic tones on the speaker system in the hangar and the familiar buzz of the radios on their flight suits.
Forget about lunch.
The on-duty crew, including Thoerner, Hendricks and pilot Larry Larson, went to work. Larson checked the weather — it was a clear day, great for flying — and officially accepted the flight, and the crew pulled the helicopter out of its hangar at Airlake Airport.
Air Care, owned by North Memorial, moved its helicopter base from the hospital to Lakeville in May to complement its locations in Brainerd, Princeton and Redwood Falls. The Lakeville base began offering around-the-clock coverage in June and is building a new hangar at Airlake.
Three other air ambulance services, one affiliated with the Mayo Clinic, also offer transport from bases throughout Minnesota, including Rochester and Eden Prairie. But for many south-metro residents, the addition of a Lakeville base with a helicopter that can hit 180 miles per hour means a savings of precious minutes should they ever need to get to the hospital in a hurry.
An ambulance helicopter can be airborne in about five minutes. The December day that the Lakeville team sped to Independence was no exception, though pilot Larson managed to have a potluck plate sitting next to him at the foot of the helicopter’s stretcher.
Once in the air, crew members began collecting details from dispatch and firefighters who’d already arrived. (Lest the pilot be tempted to launch in poor conditions, swayed by heartrending details of an emergency, dispatch won’t talk much about it until the pilot decides it’s safe to fly.)
“He’s got some numbness and tingling in his legs, although he does have sensation in his feet, and has got severe pain in his hip area,” said a first responder, giving an early assessment of Lord’s condition. “We’ve got him on a backboard now. He’s conscious and alert and talking to us."Copy that,” replied Thoerner, talking through a headset under the steady thrum of the helicopter. “Do we have a ground crew there yet?"Negative. Not yet.”
Thoerner and Hendricks worked in tandem to prep for their patient. Thoerner got the GPS coordinates of the scene from dispatch and gave them to Larson, taped syringes and medicine vials to the ceiling (a space-saving trick in a pool-table-sized work area) and traded hand signals with Hendricks about setting up the IV bag and medications when the pilot needed silence in the cockpit.
Once they had landed and loaded Lord into the helicopter, they were right back in the air. Thoerner and Hendricks asked him questions about his allergies (penicillin), whether he could still feel his extremities (yes) and his level of pain, on a scale of one to 10.
“Nine,” Lord said.
They started him on an IV — Hendricks passing the task to Thoerner when he couldn’t find a vein on his side of Lord’s body — and gave pain and sedation medication.
A safe arrival
Six to eight minutes later, they landed at North Memorial’s helipad and sped through the halls of the hospital to a trauma room in the emergency department, where a team of nearly a dozen ER doctors and staff waited. Thoerner gave a quick briefing, then left.
Lord was lucky. He underwent surgery for a fractured pelvis and two injured vertebrae but checked out of the hospital on New Year’s Eve and is on his feet with a walker.
“I was impressed that they were there so quick,” he said recently. “By the time the fire department had me outside, the helicopter was landing.”
That was a good flight, Thoerner said later: Lord was conscious and cooperative and didn’t bleed out, as they feared he might. But every flight is different. That morning, the crew picked up a man who had shot himself. He died just as they reached the hospital, and the incident was one of the bloodiest Thoerner has seen recently. Later that day, the Lakeville crew picked up a heart attack patient in Northfield.
Always on alert
The crew in Lakeville flies two or three times a day, on average, but occasionally responds to as many as eight or 10 calls.
But then there are whole 24-shifts when nothing happens. On those days, the flight nurse and paramedic on duty check expiration dates on medications, file paperwork, look at carpet swatches for the new base — and take “safety naps” so they’ll be alert even if dispatch calls for the first time after they’ve been on duty for 12 or 15 hours. They cook meals. They watch TV.
Those days, as paramedic Rob Pearson said, “We get paid for not what we do, but what we might have to do.”
The vast majority of Air Care’s flights are for traumatic injuries or medical emergencies such as heart attacks, strokes and pregnancy complications. In Lakeville, about 70 percent of the calls are for incidents in or south of the greater metro area, Thoerner estimated.
Air Care officials wouldn’t say how many flights the 20 or so pilots, paramedics and nurses at the base have made, but the service has transported more than 20,000 patients since its inception in 1985.