JOPLIN, Mo. — In the hours immediately after the May 22 tornado, the emergency room at Freeman Hospital West took on the appearance of a military field hospital.

But instead of seeing a couple of patients with life-threatening wounds, the doctors and nurses who were there that night saw hundreds.

Gov. Jay Nixon, during a medical staff dinner Wednesday night at the Freeman Business Center, paid tribute to those doctors and nurses.

“Finding words that do justice to your heroism is difficult,” he said. “Because the simple facts of what happened on the night of May 22 defy every preconception of what is humanly possible.

“With St. John’s devastated by the tornado, and scrambling to evacuate its patients from the ruins, half of Joplin’s medical capacity had been wiped out at the exact moment it was needed most. The people of Joplin came to you that night, in wave after wave after wave.”

Nixon described what the members of the medical staff at Freeman encountered that night. They saw the walking wounded and the gravely injured. Patients were brought in on makeshift stretchers in the beds of pickup trucks.

“Everywhere you looked that night, people were packed and stacked — in wheelchairs, gurneys and blankets on the floor,” he said. “The huddled masses filled the waiting room. And the trauma rooms. And the lobby. And the hallways. And the sidewalks. And the driveway.

“All those years of training, all those years of practice, all the emergency drills, nothing could have prepared you for that night: a thousand patients in 48 hours.

“For those of us who are not in the medical profession, what you did was nothing short of miraculous. The job of saving lives is challenging under the best circumstances. And these were the worst.”

Workers inside the hospital “plunged into the chaos like troops at Omaha Beach, fueled by adrenaline, game faces on, ready to serve in any way they could,” Nixon said.

But they were hampered in what they could do. All land lines were down. There was no access to pagers, cellphones, computers or patient records. Water pressure dropped to a trickle. Supplies ran critically low, including blood, sutures and blankets.

The governor said tragedy has a way of revealing human goodness.

“It’s as if those ferocious winds — as destructive as they were — stripped away the dull veneer of everyday life and exposed your inner strength, the deep reserves of courage and determination that each of one of you possesses,” he said. “The work you did in those first stormy, chaotic hours and in the difficult days that followed did more than save individual lives. You saved a community.”

Nixon singled out some of the doctors. Among them were Ellen Nichols and Frank Veer.

Nichols survived the tornado inside the IHOP restaurant on Range Line Road. She thumbed a ride to Freeman West in a pickup that had no windows, all them blown out by the storm.

In an interview before the dinner, she said: “They recognized me as a neurosurgeon when I got to the trauma area. They took me from one patient to the next. When I was done with one, there was another and another.”

Nichols remembers working on one young boy whose spine was exposed. She remembers suturing lots of lacerations.

“Freeman did an incredible job that night,” she said. “The doctors had no communications. They just showed up. Nobody was complaining. Nobody was shouting. They just did their jobs.”

Veer, an emergency room doctor, had just finished his shift at Freeman West. As he was going out the door of the ER, a man arrived in a wheelchair holding his intestines in his lap. Veer turned around and took the man to surgery.

“He did not survive,” Veer said. “He died a couple of days later. His injuries were too severe. But that was what it was like. Within minutes of his arrival, it was just wave after wave of people coming in.

“Over 1,000 people came in that night. We only lost 11 people. Those who we lost had catastrophic injuries. Some were crushed. Some had head injuries. In a MASH unit, you might see a couple of injuries like that at a time. We were seeing hundreds.”

Of the 135 physicians who offered their skills that night, 110 were from Freeman.

“To say that we are proud of the work of our physicians since May 22 is a complete understatement,” said Paula Baker, president of Freeman Health System.

“It is an honor for Gov. Nixon to join Freeman as we show our gratitude to the physicians who so willingly give of themselves.”





Saving lives



IN THE FIRST 12 HOURS after the May 22 tornado, 22 life-saving surgeries were performed, according to Freeman Health System.