When the Angel Calls - Free Chapters
My new book, When The Angel Calls, has a larger purpose. I’m hoping to use it as a tool to highlight the bravery and dedication of air medical crews who are practically unknown to most of us in the US.
Fire fighters’ lifesaving events make the headline press at every instance, yet the majority of Americans have never heard of their local air medical crews standing ready 24/7 to risk their own lives to save trauma victims who can’t be reached by fire truck or ambulance.
Because I want to share this story with as many people as possible, I’m making part of the book free through the following blog posts. The book is available in print on Amazon and as an ebook through both the Kindle and (soon) iBooks stores.
Please enjoy the first few chapters here and consider sharing it with your friends.
FORWARD
You're driving through a dark forest, your headlights lost in the blackness. Moving fast on the two lane highway you have another hundred miles of this before you descend into the lights of the city far below.
Suddenly a large deer leaps into your view, your headlights outlining its fleeting form. You instinctually swerve to avoid it, but the car slides sideways across the road and flips violently. The last thing you feel is the roof of the car smashing into your head.
Sometime later you’re on the ground staring into the trees through a fog of pain, your vision dim and your senses blurred. You can’t feel your arms and legs. People move in and out of your tunnel of vision, bent on some purpose in the night. Your vision closes in and numbness creeps through your body. You sense an Angel nearby ready to take you away.
Death is supposed to come in silence, but suddenly you feel roaring blasts of wind blowing over you. More faces and calming voices appear out of the dark, bright lights suddenly flashing around you. They gently pick you up and carry you through the lights. This could be the Angel. Or it could be the crew of a medevac helicopter that just landed to fly you to a hospital and bring you back to life.
As a pilot, I was privileged to fly scores of missions like this night and day. Available 24/7 from bases all over the US, crews like ours fly a hundred miles or more into remote terrain to pick up trauma victims, any hour of the night or day. Landing at the scene, I would stay in the helicopter, keeping it running so we could get back in the air quickly once our patient was aboard.
My partners, the medical crew, nurses and medics trained to handle the worst trauma situations, work to stabilize the patient. How inspiring to watch them treating blood-soaked victims, organize their care and prep them for the flight. Emergency room teams save patients every day, but with all the resources of their hospital at their beck and call. Our flight crews manage the same levels of trauma working out of backpacks.
Medevac crews save over 40,000 lives a year - people struck down too far from a hospital to survive unless a helicopter flies them there. Imagine if you could hold a gathering of those happy souls. What a festive occasion that would be. The Angel would hopefully be with us, blessing the day with its presence.
Sadly though, in the years medevac crews have been operating in the US over 400 have died in helicopter crashes. Often pushing beyond the safe limits of weather and hostile territory for their patient, they pay the price. A place for them lies in the hills south of Denver, the Air Medical Memorial Survivors’ Garden where a wall holds their names. The wall has blank spaces, grim testimony to the fact that more names will join those of the lost.
Medevac flying came to the US forty years ago with well-funded, hospital-based programs that brought in trauma patients from longer distances than ever before. From the hospitals’ standpoint, the revenue from those newfound trauma patients was so large the costs for the helicopters were a minor piece of the equation. But, as insurance companies and private equity investors took over medical care in the US and squeezed hard on costs, these programs changed, emerging later under private ownership as mere shadows of their predecessors. How did this affect med crews? Longer missions in less capable aircraft, in a word, far more personal risk in an environment that was already dangerous.
Working with nurses as fellow flight crew members, pilots can enjoy the best of friendships, or find themselves victims of cold indifference. During those years spending long days and nights together at medevac bases I made friendships that have lasted to this day, and, on the other end of the personal spectrum, endured tense personal battles that generated tangled memories.
Either way, though, I marveled at their bravery and dedication. Nothing could get between them and their patient. There is good news in all this for you: these heroes are stationed in your city, ready anytime to fly out into hostile terrain to extract you from mortal danger.
Today this noble enterprise is under threat. If we are to continue to save those thousands of trauma victims the medevac business needs to be protected from destructive, profit-driven cost pressures and from fiscal convulsions in the American health care system that threaten its very existence.
Hopefully this book will shine a light on these heroes and increase public awareness of the medevac community’s need to be nurtured and protected. This book is based on my recollections and opinions. I am by no means an expert in business or corporate finance so my observations on how the medevac business evolved are those from the pilot perspective. The names of patients and medevac team members have been changed in accordance with Federal HIPPA regulations and good editorial practice
And now, our story of heroes and their frightening missions pulling trauma victims back from the Angel’s call.
Copyright © 2021 Woody McClendon. All rights reserved.
Although this chapter is being shared free of charge on flyinglowproductions.com, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to Books@FlyingLowProductions.com
