by Christina Peavler

Created on: January 28, 2009

The automatic doors flew open. Immediately I saw red. It was blood and it was lots of blood. Blood was suddenly everywhere.

I was working triage in the emergency room. It was my job as the triage nurse to decide who needed to be seen right away and who could wait. This time there was no question.

I deserted my post and pulled the two young girls through the iron gate and into the trauma room. It was chaos. Both girls were hysterical and lots of the staff were shocked. It is not easy to shock an emergency room staff pool.

I was covered in blood. I was a young, relatively new nurse at this time so I was definitely one of the shocked personnel. I stared transfixed as one of the older nurses took control.

She maneuvered one of the bloodied girls onto a trauma cart. She was having difficulty controlling the second girl. After some usually successful emergency room tactics, she initiated one I had never seen before. Nor have I seen this particular tactic used since. She slapped the girl across her bloody face and yelled to her, "Lay down on this cart now!"

I was simply watching and dripping blood onto the already saturated floor. Amazingly; at least I was amazed, the girl did as she was told. The other nurse turned to me. She said, "You already have blood all over you now find out where it is coming from." That was the thing. There was so much blood we did not know where it was coming from. It was just there, everywhere.

She handed me a pair of gloves and goggles (which was pretty much an afterthought at this point) and pushed me to the top of the cart that one of the girls lay on. This is still to this day the one experience I remember being truly scared and unable to function for a moment.

I very quickly went through a series of thoughts and decided I was going to have to swim or I was going to sink. I swam. I started at the top and worked my way down. I did not have to go very far.

The girl had several deep lacerations to the face which had severed at least two arteries. I learned later these horrendous lacerations were made by a scorn woman with a box-cutter in hand.

While I stood holding pressure to wounds on this girls face to keep her from bleeding to death, other facts filtered in. My girl had other wounds on her body from the same box-cutter. I could only handle the face. Even then I could not talk to her. She was conscious but did not open her eyes.

The older nurse realized I could not do what I was doing and talk to her too. She assigned an older veteran EMT who

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