YOU COULD HEAR the helicopter before you could see it.
It was getting louder, getting closer, with each second. The chop of its blades was cutting right through the peace of the early morning, across the rolling hills and perfect-blue California skies. For those on the ground, it was the best sound of all. It was the sound of hope.
Usually on highway patrol duty, monitoring the rush-hour traffic on the roads feeding into Sacramento, the helicopter’s crew had had a quiet morning. Easter Monday. A day for commuters to leave their cars on the driveway, to kick back, to relax.
Quiet until a few minutes ago.
Rather than attend a minor auto accident, the crew diverted to a more pressing assignment, one they just happened to overhear on the emergency radio. An early-morning, three-man hunting expedition had gone very wrong here in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. One of the hunters, dressed in battle fatigues and crouching in a berry bush, had slowly risen up to assess the positions of his party. A second hunter mistakenly interpreted the upward movement as being that of a wild turkey. His trigger response, from around 30 yards away, inundated the victim’s back and side with around 60 buckshot pellets. The victim was the shooter’s brother-in-law.
The flashing lights of various emergency vehicles on the ground guided the helicopter pilot to the correct location. As the chopper came in to land, the victim could be seen on a stretcher, his shirt cut open, an intravenous drip attached. He was conscious but, because of a collapsed lung, was finding it difficult to both breathe and talk. He was also bleeding heavily and in need of urgent surgery, but an uncomfortable ambulance ride to the nearest hospital would have very much lowered his chances of survival. Not only would getting airborne speed up the victim’s rescue, but it would also mean that he could be taken to a different medical unit, one that, while further away, was more appropriate for his needs. It specialised in gunshot wounds and trauma, boasting a permanent on-call team employed to stymie Sacramento’s high murder count.
With the severely wounded patient carefully placed on board, eleven minutes later the chopper landed on the helipad on the roof of the University of California Davis Medical Center. By this time, the hospital had called the victim’s wife. She was at home making breakfast pancakes for the couple’s two-year-old son. ‘Is he dead?’ she asked. ‘No, at this moment he’s alive.’ Eight months pregnant, she was soon on her way, with toddler in the back, driving the 20 or so miles into Sacramento along thankfully quiet roads.
The surgeons’ diagnosis confirmed the gravity of the situation – and the vital, life-saving intervention of the highway patrol crew. Another 20 minutes and the victim would have bled to death. He had already lost four pints of blood, half the capacity of the human body.
The next few hours were taken up by surgery as the team repaired his collapsed lung and removed pellets from his liver, kidneys and intestines. But it was too dangerous to get them all out. Those in the lining of his heart couldn’t be removed without open-heart surgery and were left in situ.
The victim wouldn’t come out of the heavy anaesthesia for the best part of another ten hours, but his wife was allowed to visit him in the recovery room. She was shocked by what she saw. Her husband was suspended above the bed while the staff changed the sheets, blood still dripping from the 60 holes in his back, blotting red onto the crisp, white linen. ‘He was like a colander,’ she later confided.
But she couldn’t stay with him for long. The shock of the incident had sent her into premature labour; she was having contractions every two minutes. Her destination was a maternity hospital a couple of miles across town.
The baby, the couple’s second son, didn’t actually arrive for another three weeks. By then, the shooting victim had been discharged and was home, albeit only able to slowly – painfully – move from bed to chair and back again. While the initial pace of recovery would be infuriating for a patient who was anything but patient, his resolve did accelerate the healing process. Just six weeks on from Easter Monday, six weeks after his body was decimated by that buckshot blast, he carefully climbed onto a bike and gently rode for five kilometres.
At this point, he was still the reigning champion of the Tour de France.