An NYPD surgeon expected to see gunshots and random violence. But he was more surprised by officers’ hidden traumas.
By Francis V. Adams
Los Angeles Times
I expected to see more gunshot wounds when I became a police surgeon for the NYPD three years ago. I had seen my first one as an intern decades earlier -- a suspect injured during a robbery had been brought into the emergency room -- and I still recalled the jagged, deep crater left by the bullet. The image had left its mark on me, not only by its appearance but also because it had been inflicted by another human being.
I was braced for the sight of other such disturbing wounds, but I was surprised to find that many injuries resulted from trips, stumbles and mishaps that occurred off duty. Among these were a detective who had grasped a glass that shattered, lacerating her hand and severing tendons and nerves supporting her thumb, and a sergeant building a deck on his home who had fallen through it, breaking several ribs. At first I thought this odd, that members of the police department, empowered by the law, would be as vulnerable as the rest of society.
But soon I was to learn that these men and women were vulnerable to dual risks: the ordinary dangers that all of us encounter from time to time -- and the kind created by the violent society in which we live. And sometimes, I was to find, the most difficult-to-treat wounds weren’t to the body.
Read full story: An NYPD surgeon learns the random nature of wounds