Hospital workers recall first moments of Vegas patient arrivals

Brad Skilling had just returned home form a long day in the Dumont Dunes, an off-roading haven 100 miles outside of Las Vegas, when he got the text.

Something terrible happened. Come to work.

Skilling saw the horror on his TV, then rushed to his office, the trauma ward at the Las Vegas renowned University Medical Center, where patients were pouring in. Hospital staff were already “double-bunking” – placing two patients in each medical bay – and dozens of other patients were waiting on gurneys and chairs that line the walls of the hospital hallways. Almost everyone had been shot.

“We had a few people who had been trampled, a few people who had gotten injured climbing over a fence,” said Skilling, a nursing supervisor at the hospital. “But like 99 percent of it was gunshot wounds.”

UMC was like this for hours on Sunday night, but according to interviews with multiple medical staff, the hospital was ready. After a gunman opened fire on a country music festival from a hotel room window on the Las Vegas strip, each of the city’s hospitals did their part, but likely none saved as many lives as UMC, a facility specifically focused on treating severe trauma under disastrous circumstances.

Doctors and nurses credited the success to the fact that the mass shooting, as horrible as it was, didn’t surprise UMC staff with injuries they weren’t familiar with. They just saw more of it than ever before.

“We have traumas every single day, just not of this magnitude,” said Toni Mullan, another nursing supervisor. “At any given point in time, we’ve had nine gun shot wounds come here. We’ve had three motor vehicle crashes that have three or four victims. So we fill up, but just not on this level.”

On Sunday night, all that practice paid off. Starting Sunday night, patients came to UMC in three distinct waves, Skilling said. First, immediately after the shooting, the hospital was flooded with some of its most severely injured patients, some who were delivered by ambulance, but most of whom had been dropped off by friends, family or strangers.