One of the first questions people ask flight nurses is, “Aren’t you afraid you’re going to crash in one of those helicopters?” The short answer is no. Statistically speaking, the most dangerous part of a twenty-four-hour shift at CALSTAR was the drive to and from work. I was more afraid crossing the San Mateo Bridge.
I should mention that I’m terrified of heights. To this day, I can’t walk across the Golden Gate Bridge, and the glass elevators outside of skyscrapers make me sweat. Flying, however, has never bothered me.
Many people seem to have the idea that if something does go wrong in a helicopter, it means everyone plunges to their deaths, which is simply not true. Many in-flight emergencies, in fact, can be managed without danger to life or limb.
I always felt safe in the helicopter because the pilots’ were exceptional, and I knew what they were comfortable with and what made them nervous. We were usually so in tune that we came to the same conclusions at the same time—an LZ wasn’t safe, the weather was getting too lousy, and the like. Besides, the nurses were drilled over and over in emergency procedures, and we could run through the steps in our sleep.
We also placed a great deal of trust in the mechanics. Dave, our lead mechanic, took his job very seriously and would ground an aircraft immediately if there was a whiff of a problem. At times it was frustrating because we would miss flights, and therefore revenue, but the maintenance department was adamant about grounding the helicopter for even minor concerns.
CALSTAR also had a standing rule: If any one of us was uncomfortable with any aspect of a flight, we had the power to abort, no questions asked and without fear of recrimination. Generally, when we did abort a flight, it was after a simultaneous consensus. The trust was based on personal relationships; we operated as a family.
Pete, one of our senior pilots, was the safety officer for years. He was in charge of training, as well as developing, reviewing and revising emergency aviation policies. Once a year, for example, we would review the emergency water landing procedures. Pete would place Mae West flotation devices under our chairs, turn out the lights, then time us as we located them, got them on properly, simulated an exit from the aircraft, and inflated the vests.
The first couple of times we did this I was surprised. Despite having endured hundreds of those safety briefings that most people ignore on commercial jetliners, I learned that it takes a while to figure out how to get the thing out of the package, on and inflated, especially in the dark. That’s why we needed to practice. In a real emergency water landing, particularly at night, if we hadn’t repeated this drill, we probably would have panicked and froze. But because of all the safety drills—which, frankly, get boring after a while—we would switch into an automatic mode whenever something went wrong.
One summer, Pete decided to start the drill for warning lights. The front panel of any helicopter has an array of lights that indicate various problems and their degree of severity. As we were flying along, he would simulate one or more of the warning lights and we would go through the required procedure. For the flight crew, most of the time it meant turning off the oxygen so as not to feed any flames, checking to see everything was secured, getting the appropriate radio call off to dispatch, and looking down to help locate an emergency landing zone.
One of the most serious was the warning light that indicated an engine was on fire. It became Pete’s favorite drill. He would call out, “Fire warning light,” and then turn the helicopter to the left and right while we looked out the window to see if we were trailing smoke. We’d turn off the O2 and the pilot would shut down the indicated engine, leaving us flying on only one while we all looked for a safe place to land. He did this over and over again, and the repetition was getting to all of us.
At two o’clock one rainy morning, Andy, Pete, and I were activated to San Ramon for an auto rollover. Two a.m. is a special hour for us because it’s when all the bars in California close, leaving the patrons staggering to their cars. This flight was no different. A young man who had been drinking had rolled his car on the freeway and was now trapped inside the vehicle. We trotted out to the helicopter, glad this was a quick scene call rather than an interfacility, which might have been hours long. As it was, we were overhead in less than five minutes. The CHP had shut down the freeway, and we landed uneventfully several hundred feet away. Since I was the primary nurse, I hefted the trauma bag onto my shoulder and hoofed it to the overturned car, which was surrounded by firefighters cutting it apart with the Jaws of Life. I could see a paramedic lying with half his body inside the vehicle, caring for the patient trapped inside.
The car was demolished, and pieces of it had fallen off as it had rolled down the road. Even without a report, I could tell he must have been traveling pretty fast to do that much damage.
A firefighter met me halfway. “Morning,” he said amicably. “Got ourselves quite a mess. This is a twenty-one-year-old male who lost control of his car trying to outrun the cops. Story is he got caught at a sobriety checkpoint set up by the police, and when he realized where he was, he sped off. They got up to ninety miles an hour. He lost control about a half-mile up the road and rolled end over end to here. Right now he’s dangling upside down in his seat belt, and we’re trying to cut him out.”
When we reached the vehicle, sure enough, I could see the paramedic trying to intubate him in that position. I knelt down in the broken glass and shouted in to the medic. “Is he breathing?”
“Not real well, and he’s got a barely palpable pulse. I can see a head injury, but his facial bones are stable. He looks like he’s got a flail chest on the left. You want to get in here and try a nasal tube? I can’t get a good angle to see the vocal cords, so I don’t think we’re gonna get an oral one, and we won’t be able to get him out for a while.” I nodded and he crawled backward out of the wreck.
As I slid into the car on my back, over the glass and twisted metal, Andy trotted over and I explained the situation.
“OK,” he said. “I’ll give you the stuff as you go along.” He opened the airway pouch and handed in the Neo Synephrine spray, which we hoped would prevent a nosebleed as I placed the tube. Then I held a high-flow oxygen mask over our patient’s face while Andy pulled out the endotracheal tube and prepped it. The patient now had only agonal respirations. We had to hurry. If he stopped breathing altogether, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to thread the tube down the trachea.
Gently I pushed the tube into his nose. He didn’t respond at all, another ominous sign. I waited for him to take a breath to advance it, but it didn’t come. He had picked that moment to finally give up and try to die. I advanced the tube anyway and was rewarded with a fountain of partially digested food, which spattered over the front of my flight suit. I was clearly in the esophagus, and I was emptying his stomach through the tube. I pulled it back and tried again, with the same result. It was no use. I reached over and felt the carotid pulse—it was barely palpable at about ten.
“Andy, he’s arrested. Hand me the cric kit.” It was useless to try to do compressions with him dangling upside down, and I knew we had to get an airway before anything, so my plan was to perform a cricothyrotomy. I had done it on patients lying flat on a backboard, but never in the dark, in the rain, with a patient suspended upside down above me. There wasn’t time to discuss the issue—our patient was nearly dead. To make matters worse, Andy wouldn’t fit inside the vehicle with me, so he couldn’t help. I was so scared my hands were shaking.
Andy handed me a Betadine swab to clean the neck. I palpated his throat and found what I hoped was the cricothyroid membrane. “OK, hand me the scalpel.” He placed it in my hand, and I made an incision through the skin and between the rings of the trachea. There was very little bleeding, since our patient now had no blood pressure. As soon as I was through, I pushed my finger into the hole in the trachea so I wouldn’t lose it, held my other hand out and asked for the trach hook. Andy handed it to me, and I put it in place to keep the surrounding tissue from falling into the incision. Then I sawed through the membrane to get to the trachea. “Trach tube,” I said when I was done, and held my hand out again. Andy slapped the tube into my hand with the ETCO2 detector already attached. I threaded it in, still holding the hook to keep back the skin. Once the trach tube eased into place, I inflated the balloon to achieve a seal.
“I think I got it,” I said as I began bagging him. We had an airway. I secured the tube by wrapping a cloth tape around his neck and tying it.
“Andy, he’s still got no blood pressure. We have to get him out of here now.” The firefighters, who had held up till the cric was completed, resumed their efforts. Since the paramedics had been able to start an IV before our arrival, they got busy pushing the emergency medications. The firefighters handed me a blanket to protect myself from the sparks and glass as they worked, and under the blanket I continued to bag the patient while lying on my back in the damp darkness with him dangling above me.
After what seemed to be an eternity, they finally got the car pulled apart, and I held our patient’s neck in alignment as we eased him onto the backboard. Now that he was getting oxygen and emergency medications, he had a faint pulse again. As fast as we could, we finished packaging him and loaded him on the helicopter for the seven-minute flight to John Muir.
En route we found he did have a blood pressure, but not much of one. Andy started a second large-bore IV and we poured in the fluids. We barely had enough time to radio a report to the hospital to let them know what we were bringing. We did a hot offload and rolled into the trauma room at a full run. As we moved him over to the gurney, he arrested again. Andy and I backed out of the room as the trauma team took over.
We retired to the back room to start our never-ending paperwork, but I couldn’t concentrate; there was still too much adrenaline. Putting in that cric was one of the most frightening experiences of my life. Andy put his arms around me. “You did great,” he said. I took several deep breaths, and slowly my heart rate came back down to normal.
On the flight home, Andy and I were trying to get our paperwork done so we could get to bed. It had been a long day, and that flight drained what was left of my energy. Suddenly Pete called out, “Fire warning light.” Andy and I groaned, put the paperwork down, and went through the drill.
“OK, oxygen is off,” Andy recited tiredly. “I’m getting off a call to dispatch. I’m looking—no smoke or flames on either side.”
“Very good,” Pete said.
“Do ya have to do that every night, Pete?” I whined as we flew on through the night.
“Come on, Janice, you know that the best time to do drills is at night when everybody’s tired. Stop bitching.” I sighed, reaching again for the paperwork. He was right, but I wasn’t in the mood for a lecture.
Two hours later, at 4:30 a.m., we were just finishing up restocking and charting when we called John Muir. Our patient had died twenty minutes after arrival.
The adrenaline was now long gone, replaced by an overwhelming weariness. “Andy, I gotta get into bed. I’m exhausted.” I went into the bedroom, pulled off my stinking flight suit and fell into bed. I was asleep almost instantly.
After what seemed like only a few minutes, the phone rang. I reached over, knocking it onto the floor as I answered it with a mumble. I glanced at the clock. It was 6:15 a.m.
“You’re going to Delta Memorial for a gunshot wound,” said Elise, our dispatcher. “Sorry to get you out of bed again. You’re taking him to John Muir.”
Andy stirred on the other side of the room. “We got a flight?” he asked, groping for his flight suit. I nodded as Elise gave me the information. Andy jumped up and pounded on the wall. “Pete, we got a flight!” he yelled as he zipped up his flight suit and scanned the ground for his boots.
We had been activated to a small hospital in the Delta to transport a thirty-five-year-old patient who had been dumped outside their ER twenty minutes ago. He had been shot and was in bad shape. We trudged out to the helicopter in the lightening morning sky. This was our fifth flight of the shift, and I was exhausted. Thankfully, it was a relatively short distance to Delta Memorial, and our flight to John Muir would be short, too. We landed in the parking lot, where an ambulance met us.
We walked into the ER to find an enormous man, intubated, lying on a gurney and surrounded by feverish activity. The doctor was placing a chest tube as we came in.
“Boy, are we glad to see you,” he said. “The staff found this guy about half an hour ago lying in the ER parking lot. Somebody must have dumped him there. He has four gunshot wounds—two in his right chest, and two in his umbilical area. No idea when he was shot, or with what, or what range. The chest X-ray showed a pneumothorax on the right. He’s real hypotensive, and we have two big IVs. We’ve ordered some O-negative blood, ’cause we didn’t have time to cross-match him. It should be here in a minute. His blood pressure is only eighty, and we’ve been pouring fluids in him. I called the trauma doc over at John Muir and they’re waiting for you.”
Andy and I went to work getting him ready. A nurse pushed the copied chart and X-rays into my hand, and another brought us two units of blood, one of which we hung right away. As quickly as we could, we packaged him up and, with the help of six people, managed to move him over to our litter. He was so big we had a hard time getting the belts around him. We pushed him out to the waiting ambulance for the short ride back to where Pete was waiting.
When we arrived at the helicopter, I slid out and loaded in our bags, the X-rays, chart and blood. I turned on the oxygen, then trotted back to the ambulance where Andy was waiting with the patient. “OK, ready for you.” We pulled the patient out of the back of the ambulance and rolled him over to the helicopter.
As we pulled him up, Pete held up his hand. “Oh, shit. How much does this guy weigh?” he asked, pulling out his flight calculator. My heart sank. We hadn’t thought to check weight and balance, and since it had been only a short ride to Delta, our gas tank was almost full, adding a significant amount of weight to the helicopter.
I looked at the man and rummaged through the chart quickly. “They have him down as about 280 pounds—around 125 kilos.”
Pete punched the numbers into the computer, shaking his head. “I’m sorry, no way is that going to work. We’d be way over on weight. If I’d have known, I could have flown around burning off some fuel while you guys were inside. I’m really sorry.” Andy and I looked at one another, trying to decide what to do.
“Put him back in the ambulance,” Andy said to the paramedics. “Sorry to do this to you, but we’re hijacking you. You’ve got to take us by ground.” Normally the drive to John Muir from Delta would be around twenty minutes, but we were now facing morning rush-hour traffic. Still, Andy was right; we had no other option.
Andy turned back to Pete. “Call dispatch and let them know—and tell them to contact John Muir and give them an updated ETA. We’ll call report to them directly from the radio in the ambulance. You can fly over there and meet us. It’ll probably take about half an hour.” Pete nodded and we jumped back into the ambulance, setting off with lights and siren.
All the way to the trauma center, we frantically pushed fluids. I kept kicking myself—I should have known to ask for the weight as soon as we got there and relayed the information to Pete. As the secondary nurse, that was part of my job. Andy had the grace not to mention my oversight. We worked silently as the ambulance wound its way through bumper-to-bumper traffic. I looked shakily at my watch. It was 7:30, and the new crew should be in quarters by the time we got home.
After an eternity we pulled into John Muir’s ER. Remarkably, our patient had not deteriorated en route, but he remained a very sick man. We gave report, knocked out a quick chart, and headed back for the helipad where Pete had flown in to meet us.
The flight back to quarters was quiet as Andy and I again tried to finish up the chart. The new crew was waiting for us, and we had radioed ahead to let them know they needed to restock the bags. My exhaustion was now complete, and I decided to try and sleep an hour or two at quarters before I went home, since I didn’t think it was safe to do the forty-five-minute drive. I looked out the window and saw we were just about back at the airport.
Then Pete keyed up the intercom. “Fire warning light.”
I had had enough. Five flights, up all night, a middle-of-the-night cric, and then the stupid oversight that meant we had to take a patient by ground. “Fuck you, Pete. Not now,” I said, not even looking up at the warning panel.
“I’m not fooling,” Pete answered sternly. “We got a fire warning light.”
I looked up and, sure enough, we really did have a light. We launched into that automatic mode: Pete pulled the throttle all the way back to shut down the engine, then banked to the right and left as Andy and I craned our necks to look for smoke or flames. I reached around and ensured the oxygen was shut off. There was no time to call dispatch.
We were about thirty feet off the ground when Pete came up on the intercom. “We’re doing a run-on landing, so make sure you’re all secure. This could be bumpy.” With that, he flared the helicopter slightly to decrease our forward speed, then pushed the nose down. We hit the runway and skidded for a good forty feet, coming to a stop with a lurch. The rotors flung forward, then back again. Pete pulled the throttle back to shut down the remaining engine. Only two minutes had elapsed since he called the light.
Beth, Harry, and Tim, the oncoming crew, had watched the landing from quarters and now came running out toward us as I unsteadily climbed out of the helicopter. There was no fire. I stood dumbly looking at the engine cowlings, expecting them to erupt into flames at any moment. Beth ran up to me yelling, “Are you guys all right? What happened?”
The night had taken its toll, and I burst into tears. “We had a fire warning light and the patient was too fat and we had to go in traffic and he was shot and the guy was hanging upside down and I had to do a cric….” She put her arms around me as I babbled. Andy climbed out, gray and shaking, too, but at least coherent.
“We just had a fire warning light that we thought was real,” he said, stepping down from the skid. “That’s why we did the run-on landing. We’ve had a pretty hellish shift. I’ll tell you all about it later. We got to get Dave out here to check the helicopter.” Beth gently propelled me, still sniveling, into quarters.
“Janice, how about a cup of tea, OK?” I nodded, trying to stop the tears. She sat me down and handed me some hot tea. Andy followed us in, sat heavily on the couch, and swore under his breath.
The next day we got everything sorted out. The fire warning light had been caused by a broken wire, and we were never in any danger. Our large patient did fine once he got to the OR to get his holes fixed. I went home and slept like a dead woman.
That fire warning light haunted me for the rest of my tenure, although we never had to do another run-on landing. We did, however, have a run in with another potential menace. We told this story any time a visitor noticed the duck decals—two and a half ducks to be precise—on the pilot’s door of the helicopter.
Beth and I had just returned from a butt-numbing, four-hour flight with a cardiac patient from Visalia to San Francisco. “They certainly didn’t design those seats with comfort in mind, did they?” she said as we ambled into quarters, clutching the patient’s five-page chart. As we got into the office, I picked up the phone to call dispatch to get the flight number for the log. James, our dispatcher that day, answered.
“Hey, James, it’s Janice. You got a flight number for me?”
“Sure. It’s 10136C497F. And you missed a flight while you were gone, too,” he said.
“Rats. What was it?”
“A shark attack in Santa Cruz. Heard the guy almost had his leg chewed off. Lifeflight handled it.”
“We miss all the good stuff. A shark attack would have been a lot more fun than a cardiac patient.”
“Sure would have been. There’s a lot of media over this one, so check out the news tonight.”
“OK. Thanks. You can show us as back in service now.”
Later that night we watched the news and sure enough, there was Lifeflight, our competitor in the air ambulance business, in one of the lead stories. Apparently the patient had been surfing when the shark grabbed him by the leg, shook him violently, then let go. This is characteristic of shark attacks—they usually strike once, injuring the prey, then come in for a second, usually lethal bite. Sharks often mistake surfers for their favorite food, because a person with his arms and legs dangling over a surfboard appears from below to be a sea lion. Often they make only the initial attack and then swim off. This guy had the presence of mind to pound the shark on his nose, which also may have helped save his life. In any case, the shark didn’t come back, and he managed to paddle to shore, bleeding heavily from a deep laceration in his thigh, which had partially severed the femoral artery.
Shark attacks are relatively rare in northern California, and they usually garnered a lot of media attention. “That would have been our flight,” Beth said, shaking her head as we watched the news story. “Damn, they’ve probably already got another decal stuck on.”
There were several minutes of footage of the Lifeflight crew landing on the beach, assessing the patient, then taking off again. It was great coverage, and we were, quite frankly, jealous. Over the years we had established a friendly rivalry with the competing EMS helicopters in northern California, but particularly with Lifeflight, since we shared the same response zone. (We called them Lifefright, and they called us Deathstar.) They had got the last two shark attacks, both of which would have been our calls if we hadn’t been busy. Like World War II flying aces who kept track of their kills with swastikas painted on the sides of their airplanes, Lifeflight already had two small sharks proudly decorating their helicopter. We all felt it was high time CALSTAR had one, too. “Next one, Beth,” I said. “We’ll get the next one. We’ll get that shark decal yet.”
Several years passed with no shark attacks. Late one night, Carrie, Carl and I were activated to Richmond for an assault. It was three o’clock in the morning, and I was less than pleased to be dragged out of my warm bed. The mid-December night was moonless, with a few wisps of fog in some of the deeper valleys. We had made the same flight hundreds of times before. Dispatch instructed us to rendezvous with the paramedics at Brookside’s helipad. Eleven minutes later, Carl gently settled us onto the ground.
I grabbed the trauma bag and walked quickly over to the waiting ambulance. As I opened the doors, I was engulfed by an overpowering odor of alcohol. “Jeez,” I said to the medic as I climbed in, “how much has this guy been drinking?”
“A lot,” he answered, taping the IV in place. “This is Mr. Jones. He was found unconscious on a street corner about half an hour ago.” He pointed to our patient’s face, which was covered with abrasions. He also had two black eyes, one of which was swollen shut. “We’re guessing he was assaulted, but we don’t know with what, and he doesn’t remember the event. He started waking up after the fire department got there. His skull is stable and the rest of his exam is negative, except for the heavy odor of alcohol. He claims he has no past medical problems and denies taking any medication, but his level of consciousness markedly improved after we gave him some Narcan to reverse any opiates. But he’s still not oriented to person, place and time, so we figured he should go to the trauma center to make sure he isn’t altered because of the head injury.” I listened carefully as he spoke, and started my own primary exam.
Part of a neurological exam is to ensure the patient is alert and oriented times four: person, place, time, and purpose. If he can’t come up with all those answers, we regard him as having an altered level of consciousness and have to seek the reason. Alcohol obscures the brain’s sensorium, and we cannot be sure that the altered level is not due to head injury rather than alcohol alone. To worsen the odds, the liver is where the body makes the clotting factors that keep us from bleeding to death. Liver function is damaged by chronic alcoholism, and these patients are more prone to intracranial bleeds after relatively minor head trauma. In this case, the gentleman clearly had some facial trauma, but we had no way of knowing if he was just drunk or had some serious pathology going.
Mr. Jones was lying on the gurney in full spinal precautions, watching me with his one good eye. “Mr. Jones,” I said, “I’m Janice, one of the nurses on the helicopter. What happened to you tonight?”
“Don’t know,” he replied, slurring his words. “I was just sittin’ there, and they came and got me.”
“Where do you hurt?”
“Don’t hurt, don’t hurt at all,” he answered, despite the obvious injuries. That made sense. He was well anesthetized with alcohol and God only knows what else.
“How much have you had to drink tonight?” I asked.
“Oh, ’bout two beers,” Mr. Jones slurred, and smiled at me, revealing a dentist’s nightmare. He was missing quite a few teeth, and the remaining ones were clearly rotting through. I glanced at the medic who rolled his eyes. Every drunk in the world always answers that question the same way: “Oh, two beers,” even when faced with the overwhelming evidence that they must have consumed at least ten times that much alcohol.
“I see,” I said. “Have you taken anything else? Recreational drugs?”
“Nope. Don’t do that shit.” As he was talking, I took his left arm to inspect his antecubital veins. Most people are right-handed, so the left antecubital is the first choice for illicit IV drug use. Again, Mr. Jones wasn’t exactly being honest. His veins were obviously well used, and there appeared to be some fresh track marks.
“If you say so,” I said, knowing it was useless to point out the inconsistencies in his story. “We’re going to take you over to John Muir to have them check you out, OK? And we want you to stay still in case your neck has been injured.”
“All right,” he answered, and promptly dozed off. We loaded our friend into the helicopter and lifted off into the dark night. Occasionally he would wake up, mumble to himself, wiggle around, then fall back to sleep. Carrie and I were both rather unimpressed, and she promptly began to fill in the chart as soon as we had safely cleared the helipad. I set about hooking up the monitors and trying to keep Mr. Jones still. As I expected, all his vital signs were stable, and his oxygenation was perfect on room air. Still, just to cover the bases, I gave him a couple liters of oxygen.
To fly to John Muir, we had to go over a small range of hills that separates the bay from the Mount Diablo Valley, where the trauma center for Contra Costa County is located. It’s mostly parkland or protected open space, and at night from the air there is a dark band separating the valley, with no lights to use as reference points.
Suddenly, we heard a loud thud and the helicopter snapped violently to the right. Instantly, both Carrie and I were at attention and beginning emergency procedures. “Everybody hang on,” Carl said, as he carefully tested the flight controls. Already I was looking down at the ground, trying to make out a safe landing zone in case the engines shut down and we went into autorotation. (Helicopters, like airplanes, can glide to a controlled landing when they lose engines, since the descent will keep the rotors turning and provide some lift. But we would need a flat, safe LZ very close by.) Of course, being an absolutely black night, we could see nothing. Besides, we all knew there were precious few flat spots until we got past the ridge line.
Carl spoke quickly. “Everything is working, I have control of the helicopter. I have no warning lights. There’s no place to land out here, so I’m going to continue to John Muir for now. Keep looking for landing zones as we proceed. Get a call off to dispatch. And please turn off the oxygen.”
At that point, none of us had any idea what that thud might have been. We all listened intently. Even though the nurses are not pilots, after years of flying we became accustomed to the normal noises of each particular aircraft and could tell immediately if something was wrong. I could hear nothing unusual, and we seemed to be flying normally.
John Muir was now only about three minutes away. If we continued as we were, we could reach the hospital helipad, as long as nothing failed. I held my breath and my heart was pounding as we got closer and closer. Mr. Jones, seemingly unaware of the incident, continued to mumble and wriggle himself out of the straps that held him to the backboard. We all scanned for any unusual change in pitch or vibration. Finally, after what seemed like hours, Carl safely settled us down on the helipad.
Carrie immediately got on the radio. “CALSTAR base, CALSTAR One. We are down at John Muir at 3:32. Show us as being out of service due to an unusual occurrence. Will land-line when able.” Meanwhile, I watched Carl closely and as soon as the skids were on the ground he nodded his head, and I leaped out of the helicopter to survey any damage. My headset was still plugged in, and I was ready to quickly get away from the aircraft if any parts appeared to be falling or flying off.
What I saw was not what I was expecting. Hanging limply out of one of the jet engines was the head of a mallard duck, with the rest of his body inside the intake. The side of the helicopter was smeared with blood and duck guts. I was so shocked it took me a minute to react.
“Uh, Carl,” I said over the intercom while the engines were still running, “I think I see what the problem is.”
“What is it?” he asked anxiously. “Are the engine cowlings intact?”
“Yup. There’s a duck hanging out of one of the engines. Or at least part of a duck.”
“What? What did you say?”
“A duck. God rest his poor little duck soul. He’s in a better place now.” Despite, or perhaps because of our terror during the past five minutes, I had to laugh.
Carl shut down, and we offloaded Mr. Jones as he continued to mutter to himself. We gave a brief report to the trauma team and headed for the back room to write up the chart. Both Carrie and I were shaking and we sat down to take several deep breaths. Carrie then picked up the phone to call dispatch and get Phyllis, our mechanic, to come and survey the damage. It was now four in the morning.
As soon as we could pull the chart together, Carrie and I ran back out to the helipad. We found Carl peering into the engine intake with a flashlight. He had removed the engine cowlings and small bits of duck were scattered over the ground. “I don’t see anything seriously damaged, but there’s blood and feathers all over the engine deck,” he said, climbing down. “This helicopter isn’t going anywhere for a while. You guys should call a cab to get back to base. I’ll stay till Phyllis gets here.” He picked up a plastic bag, and heaved it into the garbage bin next to the helipad.
“What was that?” I asked.
“The remains of Mr. Duck.”
“You can’t just throw him in the garbage,” I objected. “We have to go bury him or something. Say a few words.”
“Janice,” Carl said, getting irritated with my kidding, “you don’t seem to understand. That duck could have killed us.”
Carl was right. Bird strikes are a serious threat in aviation. There have been cases where a bird has come through the windshield and killed the pilot. Birds have also been sucked into jet intakes, shutting down engines, usually at the most critical time of takeoff. If we had hit the bird a little lower, or if it had come through the Plexiglas, we could have been toast. This time it was the duck’s turn.
Several days later, I went out to preflight while Phyllis was there doing the daily inspection. I noticed some new decals on the pilot’s door. I inspected them curiously as Phyllis came off the ladder, wiping her greasy hands on a rag.
“We were lucky,” she said. “We didn’t have any major damage from the bird strike. You guys must have flown right into a flock of them. Don’t ask me what a flock of ducks was doing at a thousand feet at three o’clock in the morning.”
“A flock of them?” I asked.
“Yeah. When we put all the parts together, we found two and a half ducks. So you finally got your decals—two and a half ducks. Lifeflight, eat your heart out.”