Fingers in Heart Save Shooting Victim

A surgeon saved the life of a gunshot victim by plugging the bullet holes in his heart with her fingers and massaging the organ to keep it beating during a 14-minute helicopter ride to a trauma center, officials said Friday.

Dr. Wendy Marshall cradled the exposed heart in her hands and kept the patient from bleeding to death while she supervised his transfer Thursday from a Joliet hospital to a trauma center equipped for open-heart surgery.

Surgeons there repaired the holes, and the patient, Tommy Lee Hairston, was doing well Friday, said Marshall, director of Loyola University Medical Center’s trauma unit and its air medical service.

“We were lucky,” she said in an interview from suburban Maywood a day after the feat, which the hospital’s chairman of surgery, Dr. Robert J. Freeark, called unprecedented and heroic.

“It’s one for the books, that’s for sure,” said Dr. John Barrett, director of the area’s busiest trauma unit, at Cook County Hospital.

Marshall said the good judgment of surgeons at Silver Cross Hospital in Joliet to call for help before it was too late, coupled with the efficiency of her medical support team, made the transfer possible.

“It’s a team effort,” she said. “That’s the success of the system.”

The team was lucky because a storm system cleared the area two hours before Marshall was summoned at 5 a.m. “If the storms had still been going on, we would not have been able to fly,” she said.

She said the patient likely would not have survived transfer by ambulance. Joliet is about 25 miles southwest of Maywood.

Hairston, 29, a Joliet landscaper, was shot Wednesday night after an argument with a neighbor over missing property, police said. He was rushed to Silver Cross, where an operation was performed. However, after surgery, he started bleeding again.

A second operation revealed the bullet wounds in the heart, which could not be repaired without a heart bypass machine. Silver Cross does not have one. Surgeons called for help and Marshall arrived 23 minutes later.

Freeark said it is not unusual for a trauma surgeon to use fingers to block holes in the heart, but “that usually takes place in an emergency room, until you can get the patient to the operating room.”

“To my knowledge, no one has ever transferred a patient by any means--ambulance or certainly helicopter--from one hospital to another while a surgeon had a finger occluding a hole in the heart,” Freeark said.

He said few surgeons would have thought to try the transfer, and without it, “no question, the patient would have died.”

Adding to the difficulty, doctors said, was the fact that Hairston’s heart stopped beating three times during the trip, requiring Marshall to massage the organ between her hands--while keeping her fingers in the holes--to stimulate it to pump again.

“It would have been very easy to get discouraged with the whole thing anywhere along the way,” Freeark said. “But that’s Dr. Marshall. She doesn’t quit.”