{"id":2739,"date":"2018-05-08T11:51:24","date_gmt":"2018-05-08T15:51:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/?p=2739"},"modified":"2025-01-28T09:18:39","modified_gmt":"2025-01-28T14:18:39","slug":"when-tragedy-strikes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/2018\/05\/when-tragedy-strikes\/","title":{"rendered":"When Tragedy Strikes…"},"content":{"rendered":"
Trauma surgeon Christopher Fisher \u201993 and his team treated more than 200 victims in the aftermath of the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas last year. <\/div><\/div>\n

Last October, when Ryan Mulvaney \u201996\/J.D. \u201902 heard that someone had opened fire at a music festival in Las Vegas, he immediately thought of his friend Dr. Christopher Fisher \u201993.<\/p>\n

Fisher lives and works in Las Vegas, and Mulvaney could picture him and his wife, Misty, checking out that country music festival. Had they been in the crowd?<\/p>\n

Mulvaney texted Fisher. He texted him again. He called. His friend didn\u2019t respond to any of it. \u201cThen I started to get nervous,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Where was Fisher? What if something had happened to him?<\/p>\n

Fisher is one of Mulvaney\u2019s best friends and has been since their fraternity days at Seton Hall. Mulvaney had been in Fisher\u2019s wedding in 2016, and Fisher had a new baby at home. He had to reach him.<\/p>\n

Finally Mulvaney got in touch with Misty, who told him that her husband had pulled on his scrubs and rushed to the hospital where he worked, and where shooting victims were arriving not only in ambulances, but by the carload.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce I knew he was safe and at that hospital, I felt comforted by it,\u201d Mulvaney says. \u201cI knew that in the midst of horror, he would make people OK \u2014 either by saving their lives or doing everything in his power to save them.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the medical director of trauma services at Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center in Las Vegas, Fisher is used to chaotic shifts and life-or-death decisions. But no other night in the ER could have prepared him for October 1, 2017, when he led a team of surgeons, physicians and nurses in treating more than 200 victims of the deadliest mass shooting in the country\u2019s history.<\/p>\n

For Fisher, the unforgettable night started around 9:30 p.m., when one of his partners at the hospital texted him about a mass casualty incident.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe get a lot of alerts that usually end up being false alarms or a lot of minor injuries,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I thought, I\u2019ll just throw on my scrubs and get ready anyway. Then my pager started going off with the first gunshot wounds.\u201d<\/p>\n

He got to the hospital about 20 minutes after the first victims had started to arrive. \u201cThere were nurses running gurneys out to the ambulance waiting area to bring patients in, and the ER was just overflowing,\u201dhe says. \u201cWe have white floors, and those floors were pink that night because there was so much blood.\u201d<\/p>\n

He says that on a typical day, Sunrise Hospital may receive 20 trauma patients. That night, of the 851 people injured in the shooting, more than 200 came to Sunrise \u2014 120 of them with gunshot wounds. (Other injuries occurred from trampling and similar run-ins during the panic.)<\/p>\n

When Fisher got to the hospital, he headed straight to the operating room, where a patient was waiting for him on the table. He treated gunshot wounds all through the night, one surgery after another. By the next morning, he had performed five back-to-back, life-saving surgeries.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think I started to process it until three or four days later,\u201d he says of that night. \u201cEverybody goes into an automatic mode and you just do what you have to do. I don\u2019t think anybody really thought about the gravity of the situation until much later.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Fisher, it sank in when he returned home and saw his wife and 2-month-old daughter. \u201cI felt so grateful,\u201d he says, \u201cthat I was able to come home to them and that they were OK.\u201dLike many freshmen in college, Fisher wasn\u2019t sure what he wanted to do when he arrived at Seton Hall in 1989. \u201cI only went into biology because I liked it and I liked the sciences,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Mulvaney was three years behind Fisher in school and a fellow member of Pi Kappa Phi fraternity. Mulvaney was also one of very few students who had a computer in his room. (At that time, only one in every four or five U.S. households owned one.)<\/p>\n

Fisher had gravitated toward the study of biology by then and was targeting medical school. \u201cHe was not somebody you\u2019d see at fraternity parties or the bars around town,\u201d Mulvaney says. \u201cMore often than not, he was in my room, at my computer, working on his homework. It wasn\u2019t that he was antisocial. It\u2019s that even at a young age, he was focused on five years down the road.\u201d<\/p>\n

When his friends got into a jam, Fisher was the one who helped them. If someone got hurt during a flag football game, he took them to the medical center in East Orange.\u201cIf your car broke down, who are you gonna call?\u201d Mulvaney says. \u201cChris. You\u2019d want Chris.\u201d<\/p>\n

After Seton Hall, Fisher continued on to medical school at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. During clinical rotations, he discovered that a 12-hour day in surgery seemed to fly by when compared with a shorter, nine-hour day in medicine.<\/p>\n

\u201cI liked the immediacy,\u201d he says. \u201cIf someone has appendicitis, you take out their appendix and they immediately feel better, versus giving someone medicine and it might take a week before they start getting better.\u201d<\/p>\n

Through his residency at Pasadena\u2019s Huntington Memorial Hospital, he discovered a passion for traumawork in particular. He says there\u2019s an adrenaline element to it \u2014 and as a fan of fast cars and motorcycle racing, Fisher is into adrenaline.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe minute the trauma pager goes off and you\u2019re waiting for the patient to come in, your heart starts pumping and your blood gets going, and it\u2019s just very intense,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s funny, because when I\u2019m away from work, I don\u2019t want any stress. But I guess at work I kind of seek it out.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2005, Fisher helped develop Sunrise Hospital into a trauma center \u2014 a designation that requires 24\/7 coverage in medical subspecialties and round-the-clock surgeons, anesthesiologists and nurses who are dedicated solely to trauma work. Sheri Stucke, a nurse practitioner, joined the Sunrise trauma team a few months after Fisher arrived and they\u2019ve worked together ever since.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur group is almost like a family,\u201d she says, \u201cand he\u2019s the one who watches out for everybody.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just as Mulvaney looked up to Fisher during their time at Seton Hall and still relies on him for guidance in both his career and personal life, Stucke says other trauma surgeons at Sunrise respect Fisher and approach him for advice.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd it\u2019s not just our group,\u201d she adds. \u201cOrthopedic surgeons, neurosurgeons, cardiovascular surgeons \u2014they all go to him if there are problems or issues because they know he will look into it and solve it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stucke notes that surgeons sometimes have a reputation for being temperamental or lacking in bedside warmth, but she says Fisher is the opposite: calm, easygoing and deeply connected to the people he treats.<\/p>\n

She says his level-headed leadership was essential the night of the Las Vegas shooting. \u201cAnd at the end, when everything was over and [our team] sat down and talked about things, he made sure everybody was OK,\u201d she says. \u201cIf anybody needed to talk, he was there for them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fisher credits his Catholic faith, strengthened during his time at Seton Hall, with helping him through the night of the shooting and other difficult times. He says the strong sense of compassion that\u2019s woven into campus life stuck with him, too.<\/p>\n

\u201cYour faith is something that you can really lean on to help you make sense of things and provide some comfort,\u201d he adds. \u201cWhether you pray to get some understanding, pray to do the best job that you can, or take comfort from your religion to get over the trauma of something like this \u2014 I think it\u2019s helped me in all of those ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Molly Petrilla is a freelance writer based in New Jersey.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trauma surgeon Christopher Fisher \u201993 and his team treated more than 200 victims in the aftermath of the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas last year.<\/p>\n

Continue ReadingWhen Tragedy Strikes…<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":4073,"featured_media":2818,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,258,12,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-articles-2015-2019","category-features","category-pirates-in-print","entry"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4073"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2739"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2739\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2839,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2739\/revisions\/2839"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}