Dr. Laurie Punch (heart), a trauma surgeon at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, reveals Melissa Woeppel (left) and Stan Schloesser apply a tourniquet throughout a Stop the Bleed class final month in St. Louis.
This story additionally ran on NPR. This story could be republished at no cost (details). ST. LOUIS — Dr. Laurie Punch plunged her gloved palms into Sidney Taylor’s open chest in a hospital’s working room right here, pushing on his coronary heart to make it pump once more after a bullet had torn by his flesh, collarbone and lung. His pulse had pale to nothing. She wanted to get his coronary heart beating.
She couldn’t let the bullet win.
Bullets are Punch’s enemy. They threaten every little thing the 44-year-old trauma surgeon cherishes: her sufferers’ lives, her group, even her household. So, simply as she recalled doing two years in the past with Taylor, Punch has made it her life’s mission to stem the bleeding and the injury bullets trigger — and excise them if she will.
In the working rooms at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, Punch treats gunshot victims, eradicating bullets that research present can poison our bodies with lead and gasoline despair. And in her violence-racked group, she teaches folks use tourniquets to cease bleeding, making a legion of helpers whereas constructing belief between medical doctors and group members.
Punch feels a calling to St. Louis, a spot with the nation’s highest homicide price amongst massive cities, the place not less than a dozen kids have been shot to loss of life this summer time alone, together with a 7-year-old boy taking part in in his yard. Punch believes all she’s realized has ready her for now, when gun violence kills a median of 100 Americans a day and mass shootings are so frequent that two this summer time struck lower than 24 hours aside.
To her, the battle is private, in additional methods than one.
Dr. Laurie Punch, a trauma surgeon at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, is adamant that violence is a real medical drawback medical doctors should deal with in each the working room and the group.
Besides being a surgeon, she’s a multiracial single mother residing in Ferguson, Mo., simply over a mile from the place Michael Brown Jr., a black teenager, was shot and killed by a white police officer 5 years in the past.
She has a son the identical age because the little boy killed within the yard in August. And she mentioned, “I hear the gunshots echoing through my 2-acre backyard all the time.”
Stopping A Deadly Disease
In September, Punch introduced her message to Washington, D.C., testifying before the House Ways and Means Oversight subcommittee on gun violence. Wearing a jacket and tie, she confronted lawmakers to share the story of Shannon Hibler.
The 23-year-old was dropped at Punch’s hospital final summer time, shot seven instances. While the nurses gave him blood, Punch mentioned, she lower open his chest, attempting to drive life again into his physique — to no avail.
“I watched his wife sink, as the floodwaters of vulnerability and risk came into her eyes, thinking about the life of her and her child and how they would live without him,” Punch informed the assembled lawmakers. “I watched his father rage. And I heard his mother wail.”
Dr. Laurie Punch testifies in September earlier than the House Ways and Means Oversight subcommittee on gun violence, seated subsequent to a pair of blood-spattered Adidas sneakers. She was sporting them the day she tried to save lots of a 23-year-old who had been shot seven instances.
Punch positioned the black-and-yellow, blood-splattered Adidas sneakers she’d worn the day of the taking pictures on the desk earlier than her within the listening to room.
“I can’t wash these stains out,” she informed lawmakers.
The trauma surgeon was adamant: Violence is a real medical drawback medical doctors should deal with in each the working room and the group. Until they do this, she mentioned, violence victims will proceed to be vectors who unfold violence.
“The disease that bullets bring does not yet have a name,” she informed Congress that day. “It’s like an infection, because it affects more than just the flesh it pierces. It infects the entire family, the entire community. Even our country.”
But therapeutic additionally could be contagious — spreading amongst victims, households and the physicians themselves.
Punch, who often visits the neighborhoods the place her sufferers reside, attended an occasion final 12 months for Saint Louis Story Stitchers, an artist and youth collective working to forestall gun violence. She remembers recognizing a volunteer she knew — Antwan Pope, who’d been shot some years earlier however had discovered renewed function serving to younger folks.
Punch informed Pope about Hibler’s case, and realized Hibler was Pope’s cousin. Hibler’s dad was on the group occasion, too, and he handed Punch a lapel pin along with his son’s image.
She wore it on her white coat for months.
Two Worlds
Punch was born in Washington, D.C., the one youngster of a Trinidadian father and white Midwestern mom. They separated six months after her start.
Until she was 7, Punch moved yearly together with her mother. They ultimately settled with Punch’s grandmother within the tiny city of Wellsville, Ohio, a close-knit however segregated group.
Classmates bullied her for being completely different, Punch remembers.
“I was different in every way because I wasn’t black; I wasn’t white,” mentioned Punch, who later got here out as homosexual.
From the time Punch was 9, she took $2 piano classes from Elizabeth Carter. The native music trainer had remodeled former drug dens into locations with music classes, free garments and meals, and put all the children who sought her assist to work. Punch’s task was serving meals.
“You show someone that they can help,” Punch mentioned, “it’s revolutionary.”
That lesson guided her life as a toddler and when Punch moved on to Yale University, the University of Connecticut’s medical faculty after which the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, the place poverty and trauma scarred lots of her sufferers’ lives.
Participants take heed to Dr. Laurie Punch, a trauma surgeon at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, as she teaches a Stop the Bleed class final month in St. Louis. “It’s far more than teaching people what to do,” Punch says. “They learn: ‘I am not simply a victim or a perpetrator or an observer; I’m a helper. I have the capacity to help.’”
Punch spent her early profession within the shock trauma heart in Baltimore, throwing every little thing she had into saving others.
After marrying a girl she met as a medical intern, Punch grew to become pregnant with twins at 35.
The subsequent few years have been marked by highs and lows in her private life and the unrelenting stress of coping with the aftermath of violence at work.
She miscarried at 5 months. No one may inform her why.
Five months later, she grew to become pregnant once more, this time giving start to a wholesome boy, Sollal Braxton Punch. But not lengthy later, she and her spouse separated. Now she discovered herself as a single dad or mum because the pressures of her job mounted.
One morning, three taking pictures victims arrived on the trauma heart, shortly adopted by a automobile crash sufferer who was pregnant. Punch’s nanny texted her, saying Sollal had a fever of 102.three.
“I realized I can’t do this anymore,” Punch mentioned. “I just can’t.”
The Call Of Community
So, she took a break from trauma for greater than two years, specializing in common surgical procedure at Houston Methodist Hospital in Texas.
But in 2015, a former colleague contacted her a couple of job as a trauma surgeon and educator at Washington University in St. Louis.
She feared going again to a different troubled metropolis. Michael Brown Jr. had been killed in Ferguson, Mo., a bit greater than a 12 months earlier, triggering unrest and riots in that metropolis simply outdoors St. Louis.
Despite the realm’s well-known historical past of violence, she flew to St. Louis for interviews, then rode round Ferguson with Dr. Isaiah Turnbull, an assistant professor. He identified the spot on Canfield Drive the place Brown’s physique had lain within the street for greater than 4 hours.
“It was almost like seeing Ground Zero,” Punch mentioned. “This is where it all went down. And it went down because of deep structural realities that caused the experience of black and brown people in north St. Louis to be fundamentally different. I went from not wanting to go to wanting to be right in the middle of it.”
And now she is.
Project supervisor Erica Jones (heart) reveals Tracy Russo (proper) pack a wound throughout Dr. Laurie Punch’s Stop the Bleed class final month in St. Louis. The program helps educate the general public on take care of a gunshot sufferer instantly following the trauma.(Whitney Curtis for KHN)
Project supervisor Erica Jones demonstrates correctly apply strain to a wound. (Whitney Curtis for KHN)
On a latest sizzling summer time night, 20 folks — some black, some white — gathered round Punch. A couple of toes away, a physician, a trauma nurse and a medical pupil stood close to tables stacked with “pool noodles,” the lengthy foam cylinders youngsters play with in swimming swimming pools — these occurred to be in regards to the width of a human arm.
Punch informed the category that an individual can bleed to loss of life in a minute, however an ambulance can take 15 minutes to reach.
“If you can stop the bleed, you can save a life,” she mentioned. “Time is life and minutes matter.”
Participants practiced packing wounds by urgent gauze into holes within the pool noodles. They tightened tourniquets — first on the froth cylinders, then on one another.
Punch is aware of one of many medical doctors who created the “Stop the Bleed” coaching classes after the mass taking pictures at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. She realized the identical coaching may save lives after road shootings, too.
Since March 2018, she and her staff have educated greater than 7,000 group members within the St. Louis metropolitan space. Many come to a rented house she dubbed “The T,” for trauma, tourniquet and time. But Punch’s staff has additionally held courses in faculties, a juvenile detention heart and a firing vary.
“It’s far more than teaching people what to do,” Punch mentioned. “They learn: ‘I am not simply a victim or a perpetrator or an observer; I’m a helper. I have the capacity to help.’”
Dr. Laurie Punch (proper) and challenge supervisor Erica Jones reveal apply a tourniquet throughout a Stop the Bleed class in St. Louis.
Contagious Healing
Two years in the past, Sidney Taylor was shot outdoors his brother’s comedy membership in north St. Louis County whereas attempting to assist a pal who was drunk. When Taylor arrived at Punch’s hospital, profuse bleeding had left his blood strain dangerously low.
At one level, the daddy of 4 technically died on the working desk, however Punch and her staff pulled him again.
After 10 days in intensive care, the longtime wrestling coach was nonetheless in bodily and psychological agony.
That’s the purpose when many sufferers slip again to their communities unhealed. But Taylor, now 47, confirmed up in Punch’s clinic a month after he had been shot, they usually bonded throughout a 25-minute go to. Punch described to him how her staff had eliminated a part of his lung and inserted a respiration tube.
“Wow,” he informed her. “I have another chance at life.”
Punch mulled a thought, then requested. “Would you ever want to share your story?”
Taylor agreed.
Punch recruited his hospital caregivers to create a video of their reminiscences of saving him. When the taping completed, Taylor hugged every one.
Punch makes use of the video throughout talks, generally inviting Taylor to affix her. Giving again to the group in that approach has saved him a second time, he mentioned.
After getting shot, “I could’ve basically turned to the dark side and done straight revenge,” Taylor mentioned. “But I didn’t because of her.”
Stan Schloesser (heart) practices utilizing a tourniquet with help from challenge supervisor Erica Jones. (Whitney Curtis for KHN)
Tracy Russo (left) and Brittany Conners take heed to trauma surgeon Dr. Laurie Punch as she teaches a Stop the Bleed class final month in St. Louis. (Whitney Curtis for KHN)
