Well the last 24hrs was a blur. It was a peaceful Sunday night and I was just about to change out of my multicam uniform and into my flannel PJ pants and T-shirt when there was a pounding at our tent door. My tent mate opened the door and one of our young specialists was at the door. “Hey, there is a GSW coming in from the gate. It’s an Afghan who was shot in the chest,” immediately came out of the young soldier as the tent door swung open. “Great” sarcastically mumbled my anesthesia buddy from the room next to mine. “Hey Weaver…did you hear that”, I called out as I reluctantly put my multicam pants back on. “Yep,” replied the sleepy voice of my anesthesia buddy.
As I walked out of my tent, there were a few of the new soldiers that had just arrived to the FOB to relieve some of the guys that had been here for 360 days, walking around. “You ready?” I asked them. “Ready for what?” they replied. “GSW to the chest in 15 minutes” I answered. They had only been on the FOB for one full day and they had never deployed before. Their eyes were as big as saucers as we all headed over to the hospital.
As I walked in to the hospital, my best friend out here (the orthopod), asked if I had heard about the trauma coming in. I told him what I had heard and went to the ER to get the trauma bay and medics ready.
The medics were in their place and I, as I always do, began running through a mock scenario of what we were about to see. I ask them “if…fill in the blank… happens, what will you do” type questions. It’s like a little warm up to get them thinking in the right direction.
Before long, the patient is being unloaded from the field ambulance (a modified humvee) and brought into the trauma bay. He is soaked in blood. Blood is dripping from his blood drenched pants, which were the only thing he was wearing at this time. The translator immediately starts peppering this 35yo guy with questions to get an assessment of how “with it” he is and if he has any medical problems. The patient is barely conscious and his vital signs reveal that he is about 10 minutes from crossing over to the other side….so to speak.
The medics get IV’s in place and draw blood work, while the rest of the team quickly evaluates the patient like a NASCAR pit crew. There is a large exit wound about the size of a kiwi in the middle of his right clavicle. Blood is welling up in this cavity like someone had left a water fountain running with a clogged drain. We shove a large curlex roll into the hole and I let the team know that we need to be in the OR now.
I head back to the OR to talk to my head scrub tech (who also happens to be in a Bible study with me) and let him know that we are going to need the major vascular set open and possibly the thoracotomy set too. He calmly says, “No problem,” and continues to get the sets opened, counted and ready.
Justin, my ortho friend, asks if I will need him to help. “Yeah, that would be nice.” I let him know. And we both go back to scrub our hands. By the time that we are ready, the patient is ready too.
Long story short, we repair the lacerated subclavian vein, tie off some bleeding smaller arteries, and get him out of the OR to continue warming and resuscitating the patient. And he does great. The next day we take the breathing tube out and send him to a local Afghan hospital at 4:30 in the afternoon. That night I only slept 3 hours. It’s amazing what is involved in one small word….resuscitate.
In human physiology, resuscitation happens at the cellular level, and it has to do with oxygen delivery. Each cell in the human body needs oxygen to live. People breathe in oxygen and it gets transferred in the lungs to a certain kind of molecule in the blood. The blood carries the oxygen to the cells through smaller and smaller blood vessels until the vessels are so small that the blood can only pass in a single file line. When the blood cells travel by tissue cells that have low oxygen levels, the blood cells release the oxygen that they have stored in them to tissue cells that are literally suffocating.
The ultimate reason people die when they get shot is because a bunch of cells are suffocated due to lack of oxygen delivery. Now how does that happen? Well given the above information, if you don’t have one (or enough) of the following, you can’t deliver oxygen to the cells: oxygen, blood, functioning lungs (basically I spent all night “tweaking” these three variables to optimize oxygen delivery to this Afghan’s cells). Interestingly, if only a few cells die from lack of oxygen, the body can “deal with it” and make some new cells. But at a certain point, or at a certain number of cells, the body can no longer compensate for the amount of tissue that died, and the whole body dies too.
Now I know that Paul didn’t know all this when he wrote Romans 12 or I Corinthians 12. But I know that God did. You can have a greater understanding of God by looking at “His Image”… namely, by looking at human physiology. It is no coincidence that the Greek word for the third person of the Trinity is pneuma (πνευμα), "breath, motile air, spirit". Where there is no pneuma, there is no life! Where there is no Spirit of God you cannot have life; and where there is no oxygen or breathing, you cannot have life. Furthermore, where there is no blood, there is no life. Without Christ’s blood we cannot have eternal life.
Now an important distinction to point out is the difference between resuscitation, and resurrection. I am not in the professional business of resurrection (although there have been a few times in my life when I witnessed this happen in the OR or ICU….truly miraculous). But I more frequently deal with resuscitation. Resurrection is going from dead to alive. Whereas resuscitation, a tough word to spell if you do not know the Latin roots behind it, comes from the Latin root word cito, citare, citavi, citatum—to set in motion, rouse, excite, hence, to resuscitate is to ‘set (one) in motion again.
As I walked out of my tent, there were a few of the new soldiers that had just arrived to the FOB to relieve some of the guys that had been here for 360 days, walking around. “You ready?” I asked them. “Ready for what?” they replied. “GSW to the chest in 15 minutes” I answered. They had only been on the FOB for one full day and they had never deployed before. Their eyes were as big as saucers as we all headed over to the hospital.
As I walked in to the hospital, my best friend out here (the orthopod), asked if I had heard about the trauma coming in. I told him what I had heard and went to the ER to get the trauma bay and medics ready.
The medics were in their place and I, as I always do, began running through a mock scenario of what we were about to see. I ask them “if…fill in the blank… happens, what will you do” type questions. It’s like a little warm up to get them thinking in the right direction.
Before long, the patient is being unloaded from the field ambulance (a modified humvee) and brought into the trauma bay. He is soaked in blood. Blood is dripping from his blood drenched pants, which were the only thing he was wearing at this time. The translator immediately starts peppering this 35yo guy with questions to get an assessment of how “with it” he is and if he has any medical problems. The patient is barely conscious and his vital signs reveal that he is about 10 minutes from crossing over to the other side….so to speak.
The medics get IV’s in place and draw blood work, while the rest of the team quickly evaluates the patient like a NASCAR pit crew. There is a large exit wound about the size of a kiwi in the middle of his right clavicle. Blood is welling up in this cavity like someone had left a water fountain running with a clogged drain. We shove a large curlex roll into the hole and I let the team know that we need to be in the OR now.
I head back to the OR to talk to my head scrub tech (who also happens to be in a Bible study with me) and let him know that we are going to need the major vascular set open and possibly the thoracotomy set too. He calmly says, “No problem,” and continues to get the sets opened, counted and ready.
Justin, my ortho friend, asks if I will need him to help. “Yeah, that would be nice.” I let him know. And we both go back to scrub our hands. By the time that we are ready, the patient is ready too.
Long story short, we repair the lacerated subclavian vein, tie off some bleeding smaller arteries, and get him out of the OR to continue warming and resuscitating the patient. And he does great. The next day we take the breathing tube out and send him to a local Afghan hospital at 4:30 in the afternoon. That night I only slept 3 hours. It’s amazing what is involved in one small word….resuscitate.
In human physiology, resuscitation happens at the cellular level, and it has to do with oxygen delivery. Each cell in the human body needs oxygen to live. People breathe in oxygen and it gets transferred in the lungs to a certain kind of molecule in the blood. The blood carries the oxygen to the cells through smaller and smaller blood vessels until the vessels are so small that the blood can only pass in a single file line. When the blood cells travel by tissue cells that have low oxygen levels, the blood cells release the oxygen that they have stored in them to tissue cells that are literally suffocating.
The ultimate reason people die when they get shot is because a bunch of cells are suffocated due to lack of oxygen delivery. Now how does that happen? Well given the above information, if you don’t have one (or enough) of the following, you can’t deliver oxygen to the cells: oxygen, blood, functioning lungs (basically I spent all night “tweaking” these three variables to optimize oxygen delivery to this Afghan’s cells). Interestingly, if only a few cells die from lack of oxygen, the body can “deal with it” and make some new cells. But at a certain point, or at a certain number of cells, the body can no longer compensate for the amount of tissue that died, and the whole body dies too.
Now I know that Paul didn’t know all this when he wrote Romans 12 or I Corinthians 12. But I know that God did. You can have a greater understanding of God by looking at “His Image”… namely, by looking at human physiology. It is no coincidence that the Greek word for the third person of the Trinity is pneuma (πνευμα), "breath, motile air, spirit". Where there is no pneuma, there is no life! Where there is no Spirit of God you cannot have life; and where there is no oxygen or breathing, you cannot have life. Furthermore, where there is no blood, there is no life. Without Christ’s blood we cannot have eternal life.
Now an important distinction to point out is the difference between resuscitation, and resurrection. I am not in the professional business of resurrection (although there have been a few times in my life when I witnessed this happen in the OR or ICU….truly miraculous). But I more frequently deal with resuscitation. Resurrection is going from dead to alive. Whereas resuscitation, a tough word to spell if you do not know the Latin roots behind it, comes from the Latin root word cito, citare, citavi, citatum—to set in motion, rouse, excite, hence, to resuscitate is to ‘set (one) in motion again.
I spent the last 11 years learning how to physically resuscitate a human. I need to be as passionate and effective at spiritual resuscitation. One person who is great at spiritual resuscitation is my mother. She is like a DeBakey, or Mayo, or Hopkins of spiritual resuscitation. Spiritual resuscitation involves focusing people on the person of Jesus Christ and through prayer and Biblical teaching getting them to “breathe” again. Let’s hope we all “get this skill set down” before the final board exam… it’s expected of us.
