Not Surprised, Says Doctor Shot at Hospital

As he lay on a gurney in his own emergency room, blood spilling from his chest as his colleagues fed intravenous lines to his body, Dr. Glenn Rogers wasn’t the least surprised that a patient with a grudge had just fired a bullet into him.

Rogers, a 45-year-old internist, had worked for two years in an emergency room at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, one of the nation’s busiest public hospitals. He had come there as an idealist; he wanted to work with underserved Latino patients before going off someday to practice medicine in a Third World nation.

But grim reality gave the doctor’s idealism a certain edge. And as he worried about whether he would live or die, about what his wife would hear on the network news, Rogers did not need to be told what had happened moments before in Room 1050, the stuffy, crowded entry point where emergency patients often wait for hours to be examined.

“The whole scenario didn’t seem at all strange to me,” Rogers, weakened but recovering, said Wednesday from his hospital room, in the first interview given by any of those wounded in Monday’s shooting. “Those of us that work in 1050 have been talking for over a year about when this would happen. I guess you could say that we have placed joke bets on it, on who would be the one to be shot up. I obviously hoped that it wouldn’t be me.”

It happened early in his shift, the one day a week that Rogers works in the emergency room’s triage section, where doctors screen incoming patients to determine who will be examined immediately, who will be referred elsewhere and who will wait a little longer. It is the part of his job that Rogers likes the least--it’s like being some kind of “glorified clerk,” he says.

He was just about to ask an elderly woman about her ailments when he heard a blast rip through the room.

“All of a sudden there was a tremendous explosion and I was knocked back a few inches, and my eyes closed. And then, when I opened them again, I saw a man pointing a gun at me, and I realized I had been shot.”

Rogers ducked quickly to the left, waiting for a second shot that didn’t come. Instead, the gunman swung around, eyeing other targets. “Well,” Rogers recalled thinking to himself, “this is my time to leave.”

He got just one look at the man with the gun. Damacio Ybarra Torres, a 40-year-old Skid Row hotel resident, was arraigned Wednesday on charges of attempted murder and kidnaping in Monday’s five-hour hostage siege.

Later, on the news, Rogers would learn that Torres had come to complain about his medical care and that Torres was angry he had been made to wait. He would also learn, when his colleagues reviewed Torres’ medical chart, that Rogers had examined Torres twice.

The most recent exam was six months ago. Rogers’ diagnosis, the chart revealed, was constipation. But he also mentioned to his boss that the patient “was kind of loony, that I was concerned about this guy.”

But at 12:20 p.m. Monday, Rogers saw only a man with dark, smooth skin and a face he cannot remember. And a gun. All he could think about was that there was going to be more shooting and that if he could just get out of there maybe he could survive.

“I didn’t think anything heroic,” he said. “I just thought, ‘I’ve got to save myself.’ ”

He leaped from his chair and, holding his hand over his bleeding chest, ran further into the emergency room and out of range. “Help me, I’ve been shot,” he cried. And then, his doctors’ training guiding his actions, he lay down on the floor, knowing that he could stabilize his blood pressure by lying still. He felt weak and faint, and he knew he was losing blood fast. The bullet--doctors believe it was a .38 caliber--entered his chest on the right side, circled around inside his body and stopped close to his heart. The slug shattered inside Rogers, but did not sever any major blood vessels. Nonetheless, he lost half his blood.

Much of the bullet will be left in his body, although there is a piece lodged under the skin of his back--a flat, round segment, about the size of a nickel--that Rogers intends to have removed. Although he is anemic and tires easily, and his right lung is badly bruised, the doctor is expected to recover completely and hopes to leave USC University Hospital--a private facility across the street from the county hospital--this weekend.

Two other doctors who were shot also remained hospitalized Wednesday. Dr. Richard May, the most critically injured, was listed in critical condition but was improving slightly, hospital spokeswoman Adelaide De La Cerda said. Dr. Paul Kaszubowski was listed in fair condition.

Rogers came to his profession late--he did not graduate from medical school until he was nearly 40--after pursuing other interests. He ran an import business for a while, importing clothing from Mexico. He bought and renovated properties in Northern California. He held other jobs too--”little things,” he says, “that didn’t amount to much.”

He was drawn toward medicine because he thought it would enable him to live abroad and enjoy different cultures. He is fluent in Spanish, having learned the language at a young age so that he could communicate with neighbors in the small Salinas Valley farming community where he grew up. During his residency, he took a year off to write a Spanish-language medical dictionary; the book has been published by McGraw-Hill.

Although Rogers is an internist, he took the job in the County-USC emergency room over one in the hospital’s department of internal medicine. Conditions can be wretched in the emergency room but he thought he might be able to help some people, particularly Latinos, who he says are often more appreciative than other patients.

“I like this job because I get to see a lot of patients in my eight hours and I try to do a little bit of something for each of them because I know that they’ve got nothing except what they are going to get from me,” he said.

“There are some days when I feel that I have really done a lot of good, that I’ve been able to pick up some rather subtle diagnoses in a short period of time. There are other days when I get patient after patient that has chronic problems that aren’t being very well taken care of and they are continuing their poor care by coming into the emergency room.”

As he lies in his hospital bed recuperating, Rogers has had plenty of time to think about what happened to him, and some larger themes have emerged.

He thinks, first of all, that Americans are crazy to allow their citizens to walk around so heavily armed. This is just one of the reasons he has thought about taking his wife, Cynda, an artist, and their 9-week-old boy to live in another country. “In my kind of world,” he said, “this would not have happened, because I would eliminate virtually all handguns from the country if I could.”

Second, he is fed up with the nation’s health care system. He favors a system such as Canada’s, where physicians remain in the private sector but the health insurance system is nationalized. The American system is too haphazard, Rogers says, and he has little hope that President Clinton, who has promised health care reform, will deliver on that promise.

“I don’t think anything he will do will ever trickle down to help the people here,” he said.

As for matters closer to home, Rogers expects to resume his job at County-USC, perhaps in several weeks. But when he returns he doesn’t want to be making any more bets with the other doctors about who will get shot first. “It’s got to be a little bit different,” he said, “or else I won’t go back.”

SEARCH FOR SECURITY: Hospital officials across Southern California are looking for ways to hike security. B1