Fort Worth ER doctor describes scene at JPS after I-35 crash: ‘Your training kicks in’
The emergency room at John Peter Smith Hospital on Thursday morning would’ve looked chaotic to most people. But for the hospital’s trauma team of doctors, nurses, technicians and chaplains everything was working like it was supposed to as patient after patient was wheeled through the doors.
The chaos had begun just after 7 that morning after a pileup of more than 130 cars and trucks on Interstate 35W in Fort Worth.
Little information was available when the hospital was alerted that a mass casualty event had happened 5 miles north of them . Doctors knew that a large number of cars, trucks and 18-wheelers crashed into each other on I-35W after skidding on ice. Six people died and another 65 were injured as a result of the accident.
The rush of patients started with five people who checked into the ER at once, said Dr. Chet Schrader, chairman of the department of emergency medicine at JPS.
“That’s not unusual in situations like this,” he said. “People leave the scene in their own car or an ambulance and show up quickly.”
The patients were assessed as doctors prepared for others.
Then, the first critical crash patient came in. The JPS trauma teams gathered, and surgeon Forrest “Dell” Moore became involved. He and Dr. David Bryant, an emergency room doctor who had recently started his shift, worked together to care for patients as they came into the emergency room.
“From that point for about 30 minutes, it was a constant flow of patients from the scene to the ER,” Schrader said. “Your training kicks in. Multiple things are happening at once, multiple roles are being completed, decisions are being made about the patients’ next steps, and that happens in tremendous collaboration between the physicians.”
And, while those things would have looked chaotic, Schrader said the teams at the only Trauma 1 hospital in the county are prepared to handle a mass of patients at one time. There’s an art to who’s called to assist and which rooms people are placed in. On top of that, healthcare workers now have to be careful about COVID-19.
“There’s a normalcy around the chaos that exists,” Schrader said of COVID. “We take all the appropriate precautions and make sure that as folks are brought in, we are acutely aware that COVID is in our community. I think, for as tired as healthcare workers are, the switch just turns on.”
There’s also an emotional toll that comes with working in the ER.
“What tends to happen is you act quickly and then you process it later,” Schrader said. “There’s a very personal side to this, and that’s why it’s much larger than just an ER physician or trauma surgeon. When we talk about teams, we’re talking about nurses, techs, chaplains, and we debrief together, and we’re there for each other.”
Schrader wasn’t able to say what kind of injuries doctors saw on Thursday, citing patient privacy concerns, but officials said at least three patients were in critical condition. The hospital saw more than 20 crash patients.
Some of them were front-line healthcare workers who were driving to work. Schrader couldn’t get into specifics on who those people were or the hospitals they represented, but said anytime a doctor is working on a fellow healthcare worker, the desire to help is just as strong as anyone else.
“We treat them just like the next patient,” he said.
When things began to settle down, everyone continued to work on their next task. On Friday, those workers returned for their next shift.
“At the end of the day, this is what we do,” Schrader said. “This is what JPS has done for a long time, and I think it’s tremendous in times like these to see it all take shape.”
This story was originally published February 12, 2021 at 5:58 PM.
