The first alert about the horror typically comes from a call, text, or emergency radio transmission that might seem unremarkable: There’s been a shooting; prepare to treat some victims. The initial message often conveys little sense of mass tragedy, no warning that the health care team is about to go through a challenge that will test and change them.
The sense of gravity escalates through updates: It’s an act of mass violence; more gunshot victims than what most doctors, nurses, and paramedics ever see at once; more severe wounds, multiple deaths; more fear in the patients.
“You’re never the same,” says Barbara Blok, MD, an emergency physician at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, who treated victims of the 2012 Aurora movie theater shooting that killed 12 and injured 70.
Christopher Colwell, MD, treated the patients from Aurora, too — 13 years after he walked through Columbine High School in Colorado to examine the bodies of 12 students and a teacher gunned down by two teens. Then associate medical director of the Denver Paramedic Division and Denver Fire Department, he assumed that Columbine was a once-in-a-lifetime event.