Last week's mass school shooting in Florida is just one of several instances in recent memory denoting the increasing frequency with which such events have begun to occur. There have been roughly 97 mass shootings in the past 35 years, according to a recent Mother Jones analysis.
Police say Nikolas Cruz, 19, opened fire at Parkland, Fla.-based Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Feb. 14, killing 17 individuals and injuring at least a dozen.
While tragedies such as last week's shooting are terrifying and heartbreaking for all those involved, it is also uniquely traumatizing for the physicians, nurses and staff who treat patients injured in such events. A 2012 study in the International Journal of Nursing found exposure to such events may have a psychological impact on nurses, which may lead to conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression.
In response to last week's shooting, Yahoo Lifestyle compiled a list of seven nurses' responses regarding their experiences with mass shootings.
Here is how four nurses described their experiences with mass shootings, as initially compiled by Yahoo Lifestyle.
1. "We had to move so quick, and there just wasn't enough room back in the emergency departments. … They started writing letters on people's foreheads like if you've got this letter, you send them over here. People who got shot in the leg were just sitting out in the hallway in chairs. We were just trying to patch up the hole real quick just to get that stabilized. Myself, some other nurses, and a doctor were out there throwing gauze and tape on people and cutting off clothes just trying to figure out where the wound was," Dean Harris, RN, a traveling nurse who was working at Las Vegas-based University Medical Center on Oct. 1, 2017, when a gunman opened fire at a country music festival, killing 58 and injuring more than 500 people, told WHAS 11 News.
2. "Our first patient came in, and then we got to work. That's what we do in the emergency department. So we were starting, and then another patient came in. And then another patient came in. And another patient came in, and they just kept coming, and they had wounds like I had never seen before, and I started to get really scared, and I looked in the other nurses' eyes and they were scared too," Elisabeth Brown, RN, an ED nurse working at Orlando (Fla.) Regional Medical Center the night a gunman opened fire at nearby Pulse nightclub, where 49 people were killed and more than 50 people were injured in June 2016, told Hospitals & Health Networks.
3. "This was just people down on the concrete. I was literally putting my non-sterilized, non-gloved finger into bullet holes," Nancy Bowman, RN, told Nurse.com. Ms. Bowman was at the Safeway market where a gunman opened fire in 2011, killing six people and injuring more than 12, including former Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-Ariz. "When you're a nurse, you stay with your patient. Nurses get much more involved with their patients and the patients' families than physicians generally do. They dwell a bit longer on a death."
4. "We had a special phone number set up and had a list of where all of the injured had been taken," Anna Marie Hamel, RN, nurse director of the ER at Englewood, Colo.-based Swedish Medical Center — the closest hospital to Columbine High School, where 13 people were killed and 20 wounded in 1999 — told the Denver Post at the time. "The hardest thing was if [families asked] if we had someone as a patient and I'd tell them they weren't on the list. After I hung up, I realized I may have just told them the worst news of their lives."
To access the full Yahoo Lifestyle report, click here.