An isolated reserve, an ensemble rescue
By GRAEME SMITH
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
Winnipeg â †It wasn't just the native band constables who saved Nicholas Fisher's life when they barged past his drunken sister and found the 22-year-old lying in the hallway of his house, writhing in a smear of his own blood.
It was his friends who heaved him into the back of a pickup truck and drove him to the nursing station, the attendant who didn't have any medical training but still managed to stick an intravenous drip into his pale arm, the grocery store manager who held bandages against the knife wounds on his neck and chest.
Mr. Fisher also owes his life to the medical staff at a Winnipeg hospital, 280 kilometres south of the isolated native reserve, who gave instructions by telephone, and the team of military search-and-rescue technicians who parachuted onto a frozen lake and finally brought some calm to a frantic night on Pauingassi First Nation.
â Å“It's almost surreal,â ? said Rob Grierson, remembering the phone call he got in the early hours of Friday morning in the emergency ward of Winnipeg's Health Sciences Centre.
â Å“You're sitting on the phone, thinking, could this be happening? I mean, the worst possible combination of events: Somebody who's critically injured, in probably the most remote and isolated spot you could humanly get on the face of the Earth...It was frozen, cold, dark; there's no way in by air; there's no way out by ground, so it was quite a sequence of events.â ?
The trouble started days before the stabbing. Two nurses usually work at the medical station, which serves almost 500 people who live on a peninsula at the northern edge of Fishing Lake. But the reserve has been getting more violent in recent weeks. The nurses' superiors at Health Canada asked the RCMP about the situation, and the nurses were told to leave Dec. 11.
That left Susanne Keeper, 33, as the only staffer at the medical station. She's never had formal medical training, she said, and in her eight years as the community health representative she has never dealt with anything like the call she got on Thursday night.
Somebody called police around 11:30 p.m. that evening. The nearest RCMP detachment is 24 kilometres south, and the officers can reach Pauingassi only by air in the daylight, so they usually snowmobile across the frozen lake at night.
But the ice hadn't frozen hard enough to cross safely, Corporal Doug Thompson said, and taking a snowmobile into the thick woods around the lake wouldn't be safe.
So Constable Casey Owen and his partner had no backup when they were dispatched to a grey and white house. It's a small dwelling, where Mr. Fisher, his two sisters, their mother, and their mother's boyfriend share three bedrooms and one bathroom.
The older sister tried to keep them from going into the house when they arrived, Constable Owen said, but the officers pushed past her and found a drinking party in progress. Empty whisky bottles lay on the floor, he said, and it looked as though the revellers were also drinking a local type of moonshine called â Å“bean juice.â ?
The young man was lying on his back in a hallway near the bathroom, the constable said, and a friend was pressing a towel to his neck trying to stop the bleeding from a long gash.
They put him on a sleeping bag and heaved him into the back of a friend's pickup truck.
At the nursing station, Ms. Keeper tried to find a stretcher to unload the patient, but discovered that the equipment closet was locked and she didn't have a key. So they hauled the injured man out of the truck on the sleeping bag and laid him on the flooring of the medical unit.
His condition was frightening, Ms. Keeper said: He was pale, moaning, flailing, bleeding from the neck and chest, and fading in and out of consciousness.
She called Joe Simon, a manager at the town's grocery store who had served with the U.S. Army Rangers. She bandaged the man's wounds. Mr. Simon arrived and got on the phone with a police dispatcher, who connected them with the Health Sciences Centre.
Michael Perrella, a nurse, soon took the phone and guided them through the process of inserting an intravenous drip.
â Å“We missed a few times,â ? Ms. Keeper said. â Å“We couldn't find the veins. Then I managed to find a vein and Joe got the IV bag working, and we kept him awake.â ?
In Winnipeg, Dr. Grierson and the staff at the Health Sciences Centre frantically searched for ways to get the patient some professional help. Dr. Grierson remembered training search-and-rescue technicians from Winnipeg's 17 Wing military base, and they sounded enthusiastic when he called.
Within a few hours, a crew of military rescuers was floating towards Pauingassi on parachutes, guided by the headlights and four-way flashers of trucks that local volunteers drove onto the icy edge of the lake to mark the spot.
Other locals raced around the lake on snowmobiles and collected equipment that was dropped from the plane, and soon the bleeding man was stabilized.
A medical airlift took Mr. Fisher to the Health Sciences Centre after daybreak. He was released from the hospital on Monday.
sounds like the best thing you can say to that.
