By John Pirro
Connecticut Post Online
NEW MILFORD, Conn. — After more than five years as an emergency medical technician and a paramedic, New Milford native Andrea Repko has learned to ignore what’s going on around her as she does her job.
Even the gunshots.
So while Repko, 24, tended to the woman who was viciously mauled by a chimpanzee outside a Stamford home in Feb. 16, she was almost oblivious to the crisis and confusion swirling outside the ambulance.
As police hunted for Travis, the 200-pound chimpanzee who’d turned on 55-year-old Charla Nash, a friend of the animal’s owner, Repko and fellow paramedic Matthew Groves concentrated on saving Nash’s life.
“When we get a critical call like that, you don’t think how emotional it is,” Repko said. “You concentrate on maintaining the patient’s vital signs and controlling the bleeding.”
Nash was conscious but unable to speak — she could respond to commands — as she was rushed to Stamford Hospital, where she remained for several days. She’s since been transferred to the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, where she’s being treated for severe injuries to her face and hands.
Repko and Bill Ackley, a captain with Stamford’s emergency medical services, were among the first to arrive at the home of Travis’ owner, Sandra Herold. As they worked, police fatally shot the animal after he climbed into a cruiser and tried to attack an officer.
When she started working in Stamford a year ago, Repko heard a few stories about the chimp, who was well known because of his appearance in several television commercials, as well as a 2003 incident in which he climbed out of a car and stopped traffic at an intersection for more than two hours.
“I don’t think anybody thought that he could cause such horrific injuries,” she said.
Ackley, who lives in Monroe, said it was “amazing to us she had these type of injuries and they were survivable.”
“This was a beast taken out of his element and put into our world,” Ackley said. “What he did was essentially what they do in the jungle. I would liken it to a machine-type accident. She had some crushing injuries to her hands and some tearing injuries to her hands.”
Her head injuries “involved her entire face and scalp,” Ackley said. Nash’s eyes were injured, but Ackley would not say how extensively. Her hair had been ripped out.
“She just had disfiguring injuries,” he said. “Her nose was still there. There was some disfigurement. She did have injuries to her mouth that caused quite a bit of bleeding. It was very difficult to determine where everything was because of the blood.”
In December, surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic completed the nation’s first facial transplant, of an unidentified woman who suffered a traumatic injury several years ago. The injury left her with no nose, palate, or way to eat or breathe normally.
In a 22-hour procedure, 80 percent of her face was replaced with bone, muscles, nerves, skin and blood vessels from another woman who had just died.
It was the fourth partial face transplant in the world, though the others were not as extensive. Nor were any done as emergency operations, said Dr. W. P. Andrew Lee, chief of plastic surgery at the University of Pittsburgh.
“It would be unusual” to perform one so soon for Nash, he said.
Cleveland doctors have said it took several months to find a suitable donor for the face transplant Dr. Maria Siemionow performed in December.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.