A gunman opened fire during a country music festival in Las Vegas Oct. 1, leaving 50-plus individuals dead and 500-plus people injured. The experience proved traumatic for all parties involved, including the healthcare professionals near the site of the shooting and those assisting the injured and the dying in the hours following the incident.
Here are six healthcare professionals' thoughts and reflections on the shooting as it unfolded Sunday evening and in the hours following.
1. "Lots of shots; I ducked just a little. I felt like [the gunfire] was outside of the [arena] and I felt like if something was going on ... it was coming outside of the arena," Barry Bohlen, MD, an orthopedic surgeon at Mary Lanning Healthcare in Hastings, Neb., told KLKN-TV.
2. James Sebesta, MD, a bariatric surgeon at Tacoma, Wash.-based MultiCare Health System and former Army surgeon told The Seattle Times: "You know, I've been in a lot of bad places during my career and seen lots of mass casualty [incidents]. But in the Army, we were ready for them. … The other thing is, there was a reason for them. I mean, it was war. This was the most devastating thing I've ever seen. I could not believe it."
3. Dorita Sondereker, RN, director of emergency services at Las Vegas-based Sunrise Hospital & Medical Center, told CBS News: "Ambulances were just coming from everywhere. There were pickup trucks with patients just cutting in front of me and just trying to come to the emergency room. … There was blood everywhere, and honestly, I want to say bodies on stretchers everywhere.The patients kept rolling in and we were just trying to find placement for everybody."
4. "All penetrating bullet wounds, whether it was shrapnel or whether it was direct hits, the sickest patients had direct hits to the torso or abdomen and gunshot wounds to the head," Sunrise Hospital & Medical Center Medical Director Scott Scherr, MD, told CBS News. "[The first thing I realized was] how horrific this was and the evil that is out there. And No. 2, the sense of humanity that was shared with our community, with the caregivers that came in to help. And last night when I got home, I had tears. I had tears of joy, of pride of our team and our community, and tears of sadness."
5. Sijo Parekattil, MD, a urologist and co-director of the PUR clinic at Clermont, Fla.-based South Lake Hospital, said he and his fiancée proceeded to hide in a closet at the back of a store in the hotel to escape the chaos. "It was very scary, because we didn't know what was happening outside. You're just hoping that it's not coming to you. We were thinking about how to barricade the door. We were looking around the closet to see if there was anything that could be turned into a weapon," he said.
6. "We have a relatively large emergency department, so we were able to triage the patients as they presented by ambulance from the scene. So [we] received about 30 at a time and were able to move them off to our operating rooms if they needed to go emergently or stabilize them in those bays and then move them upstairs into beds in the hospital. We've seen events that brought us 30 patients at once, but no one's seen anything of this magnitude before," said Jeffrey Murawsky, MD, CMO of Sunrise Hospital & Medical Center.