IN THE AMBULANCE to Providence’s Miriam Hospital Gina Russo talked nonstop, but not because of her injuries. “Someone call my sons,” she insisted. She wanted to make sure they were okay. She also told the EMT that she had an ID card, twenty dollars, and keys to her house in her jeans pocket. Gina usually never carried her license or money with her, since her fiancé Fred, the big jovial bear, always insisted on driving and paying for everything, but for some reason she popped the ID and money in her pants that night.
She couldn’t stop thinking about her sons. Images of Alex and Nick raced through her mind during her final moments of consciousness inside the burning nightclub. Fred’s powerful push lunged her so close to the door, yet still she was trapped, wedged inside a mass of people all desperate to escape. Gina heard explosions and windows smashed, but the air that came inside as people escaped fueled the fire. She looked for Fred. He was gone. Instead she saw dozens of people, some on fire. The wails and cries for help became fewer, replaced by a terrifying silence, and Gina’s own breaths became shorter until she could barely inhale.
This is it, she thought. This is where I’m going to die.
She prayed to God for her boys, that they would have good lives and forgive her for leaving them like this. The last thing she remembered as she blacked out was the impact of her head hitting the floor.
Somehow rescue workers got into the building and dragged Gina out. Triaged on the scene, she was given an injection of the powerful sedative Ativan. She was badly burned and disfigured, even under her clothes. Her skin wept from its wounds. The EMT in the ambulance remembered Gina’s remark about having her ID card in her jeans, so when she arrived at Miriam Hospital in Providence she was identified. A worker in the emergency room noted on Gina’s chart that she was in a state of “severe agitation.”
Gina received more Ativan, plus morphine for pain, as the staff gave her a CAT scan to see if she suffered any neck, spine, or abdomen injuries in the stampede inside the club. After finding no obvious hemorrhages or injuries in the scan, doctors assessed and cataloged her burns. The flames and heat had ravaged nearly half of her body, with third-degree burns on her forearms, hands, and left shoulder, and fourth-degree burns on the left side of her face and scalp. Little of her left ear remained, and a respiratory exam revealed severe smoke and burn injuries in her airways. Death was imminent.
Gina needed to be stabilized just to survive the next few hours. She was intubated and put on a ventilator to keep her breathing, and administered doses of morphine and propofol to prevent pain. The swollen, oozing parts of her charred skin were treated with the topical antiseptic povidone iodine to destroy any microbes that might infect the open wounds.
In the following hours a surgeon performed a debridement of the burned skin from Gina’s face and hands, removing the dead flesh as a way to foster healing. Her face was covered in an antibiotic ointment, and her hands and arms treated with Silvadene cream, another antibiotic, then loosely wrapped in bandages. Throughout the surgery and treatments she was heavily sedated to avoid feeling some of the most severe levels of pain a human being can endure.
By six in the morning the decision was made to transfer Gina to the burn unit at Shriners Hospital in Boston, one of twenty-two facilities nationwide that specialized in treating children. Under normal circumstances, Gina should have been transferred to Massachusetts General Hospital with its state-of-the-art burn unit, but the number of casualties from the nightclub fire had overwhelmed New England’s top trauma centers and beds were full. For only the second time in the Shriners’ eighty-year history, the hospital agreed to care for adult patients, and Gina was one of four. The only other time the Shriners hospital system opened its doors to adults was after the terrorist attacks on September 11 in New York.
Under more heavy sedation Gina was carefully prepared for the trip and driven by ambulance. When her mother Carol and sister Stephanie arrived in Boston they were startled by what they saw in the hospital bed. The swelling and bandages made Gina appear nearly three times her normal size, like a wrapped mummy, and her family questioned if it was really her. The disfiguring burns of the nightclub fire had made many of the survivors difficult to identify, causing agonized confusion for loved ones.
Gina’s mother and sister remembered a small heart tattoo on Gina’s right ankle, so the bandage was unwrapped there for a look. Once they saw it they all agreed that it really was Gina.