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related to the patient: the circumstances of the trauma, issues, if any, during transfer, a preliminary diagnosis, if one is possible. Once the transfer is made, the patient is brought into the trauma bay, where I, and the rest of the team, go to work. It is usually a fairly seamless process, and it is one that is repeated with great regularity.
    Not so with Ben. The EMTS were covered with blood, as was the stretcher. They started to describe the scene, and one of them kept repeating something I myself said many times later, which was that there was no way the patient should be alive, and that he had no idea what was going on with him. The doctors and nurses, who were incredibly seasoned and experienced, and had seen all manner of horror and gore after years in a public New York City emergency room and trauma unit, were shocked almost into paralysis, and one of the nurses vomited. Each looked to the others for direction, which is not entirely surprising. In life we often look to others for simple, but difficult answers, despite the fact that we have those answers ourselves. They needed to get him into surgery, and they needed to do it as soon as possible.
    One of them took the initiative and urged the others to act, and they started moving towards me and my team. We can always hear them as they bring the patient into the trauma bay, hear the wheels of the gurney, the various squeaking sounds it makes, hear the nurses talking to each other, sometimes the patients scream, cry out, or moan. As they get closer, I tend to become calmer, more focused, and more aware, and time slows down in a way that makes those few brief moments seem incredibly long and peaceful. I sometimes wish I could live forever in that state, and believe that those who find enlightenment, people like Ben, though he discovered so much more than that, live their entire lives that way.
    The doors opened and he was brought into the trauma bay, and for the first time in my fifteen-year career I heard an audible gasp come from every single person in attendance. It was a surreal, unbelievable sight, like something out of a Hollywood horror movie, something that shouldn’t have been possible and isn’t possible, but was right in front of my eyes. There was blood everywhere. There were huge, deep lacerations everywhere. When I heard glass shards, I expected small pieces of glass, maybe an inch long at their longest. What he had in his body were not shards, but actual pieces, some as tall as ten inches, some as wide as twelve inches, and we were only seeing what was visible above the level of his skin. The back of his skull had been crushed, and there were pieces of it that appeared to be missing. We could not see his face at all because it was entirely covered in blood. Everything was entirely covered in blood.
    The first stage of treatment in any trauma situation is the stabilization of the patient. Death from blood loss was the obvious first concern. If a patient has lost more than 40 percent of their body’s blood volume, they are likely to be in decompensated hypovolemic shock, which usually results in multi-organ failure. While we checked his blood pressure, which was at 40 over 20, the lowest I’d ever recorded in a living patient, and checked his pulse, which was 30, again an absurdly low number, we gave him injections of epinephrine and atropine to jumpstart his heart and get his blood pressure and pulse up.
    Simultaneously, we tried to get heart-rate monitors and BP monitors on him, but it was incredibly difficult because we were weaving the wires around glass shards that had very sharp edges. We inserted a central venous line and transfused him with type O negative uncrossmatched red blood cells. Though we wanted, at some point, to take the glass out of him, we needed him to be stable first, and we needed to figure out which pieces to remove first, and in what order the rest of them would come out.
    He shut down three times in my care, went into full