Takeoff Part 2

In yesterday’s post I discussed the sublime, energizing emotionally satisfying feeling of taking off in an aircraft, slipping ‘the surly bonds of earth.’ The language of the piece matched the subject: lofty, soaring, almost poetic words, or as close to poetry as I’m likely to get. Despite my first name, my connection with poets and their products is decidedly limited.
Today’s post is the opposite side of that feeling, the takeoff filled with anxiety and dread, the liftoff into a sky clouded with uncertainty. The takeoff with a badly injured, grievously ill or terribly wounded emergency patient. In 20 years of Air Medical aviation I made this takeoff thousands of times, and each liftoff had its own element of uncertainty, its own unknown outcome. Each of those Air Med takeoffs was emotionally charged, filled with the adrenaline of medical necessity and urgency, so they were all somewhat different than the ethereal, the poetic launch of yesterday’s missive.
There are more of the emergency liftoff examples than I have room for here, or can even recall. But some stand out, a few takeoffs that reminded me of just how deep was my responsibility to the patients I carried, and their families. One I mentioned in The Sky Behind Me happened on a winter night in 1984. In the interest of patient privacy details are omitted, but my patient that night was a seven-year old farm kid from Northern Iowa who’d been gravely injured. My flight nurse and I met him at the tiny hospital. He was barely alive–loss of blood, multiple trauma, orthopedic injuries and exposure. He was not expected to live through the night, and his folks were told as much. Taking off that frigid night I launched into a sky filled with stars, headed to Iowa City, with the child close enough beside me in the cockpit I could reach across and touch him. My own seven-year old was home snug in her bed that night, so the connection I felt with the boy’s parents ran deep. I understood how they must have felt. Watching my child lift off into that star-scattered night, thinking I may not see her alive again was not something I could contemplate.
I landed at the hospital with the boy at ten o’clock. From the helipad he went directly to surgery where his lacerations and fractures were mended. He left the OR around three a.m., and spent several days in an ICU.
The upshot of the tale is that the boy survived. He left the hospital weeks later with his parents and went home. Years later, I got a letter from him. In it he thanked me for saving his life, and announced that he was about to become a father himself. He remembered nothing of the takeoff, or the flight, or landing, and that was a good thing. I did nothing heroic or particularly different than any of my colleagues would have done that chilly night. My takeoff was the same as any other. But the outcome was different; the boy pulled through, while many of my Air Med patients did not. Each one was indeed different, and exactly the same.Each one contained its own specific set of unknowns, medical particulars and family dynamics. Each takeoff had its very own drama, the challenge to make some one else’s life and experience a bit better. Every takeoff mattered.