Radiolab - Uneasy as ABC

How a plane crash in Nebraska gave us the modern ER. February 1976. A flight out of California turned catastrophic when it crashed into a farm in rural Nebraska. What happened that night at the local hospital, and crucially, what went wrong, would inspire a global sea-change in how emergency rooms operate and fundamentally alter the way doctors think in a crisis. Special thanks to Jody and Jay Upright, Heather Talbott, Dr. Ron Simon, Dr. John Sutyak, Dr. Paul Collicott, Irvene Hughe, Maimonides Medical Center, Karl Sukhia and Vanya Zvonar.We have some exciting news! In the “Zoozve” episode, Radiolab named its first-ever quasi-moon, and now it's your turn! Radiolab has teamed up with The International Astronomical Union to launch a global naming contest for one of Earth’s quasi-moons. This is your chance to make your mark on the heavens. Submit your name ideas now through September, or vote on your favorites starting in November: https://radiolab.org/moon EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Avir Mitra with help from - Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sarah Qari, Becca Bressler, Suzie Lechtenberg, Heather Radke and Ana Gonzalez Produced by - Maria Paz Gutierrez, Becca Bressler and Pat Walters with help from - Ana Gonzalez Original music and sound design contributed by - Maria Paz Gutierrez and Jeremy Bloom with mixing help from - Jeremy Bloom Fact-checking by - Diane Kelly and Edited by - Becca Bressler and Pat Walters Sign up for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected] support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Duration: 37m
Broadcast on: 23 Aug 2024
Audio Format: other

February 1976. A flight out of California turned catastrophic when it crashed into a farm in rural Nebraska. What happened that night at the local hospital, and crucially, what went wrong, would inspire a global sea-change in how emergency rooms operate and fundamentally alter the way doctors think in a crisis.

Special thanks to Jody and Jay Upright, Heather Talbott, Dr. Ron Simon, Dr. John Sutyak, Dr. Paul Collicott, Irvene Hughe, Maimonides Medical Center, Karl Sukhia and Vanya Zvonar.

We have some exciting news! In the “Zoozve” episode, Radiolab named its first-ever quasi-moon, and now it's your turn! Radiolab has teamed up with The International Astronomical Union to launch a global naming contest for one of Earth’s quasi-moons. This is your chance to make your mark on the heavens. Submit your name ideas now through September, or vote on your favorites starting in November: https://radiolab.org/moon

EPISODE CREDITS:
Reported by - Avir Mitra
with help from - Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sarah Qari, Becca Bressler, Suzie Lechtenberg, Heather Radke and Ana Gonzalez
Produced by - Maria Paz Gutierrez, Becca Bressler and Pat Walters
with help from - Ana Gonzalez
Original music and sound design contributed by - Maria Paz Gutierrez and Jeremy Bloom
with mixing help from - Jeremy bloom
Fact-checking by - Diane Kelly
and Edited by - Becca Bressler and Pat Walters

Sign up for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!

Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.

Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected].

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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Quick warning, this episode features some quite gruesome and gory injuries if you are sensitive to that sort of thing or listening with someone who is. Keep in mind, you might want to skip this one. Oh, wait, you're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC so was today a day off? Are you working later? I'm working overnight tonight. Oh, man. I work at midnight. Hey, I'm Lulu Miller. I'm left if not, sir. This is Radio Lab. What are the tides bringing into the ER right now? Oh, man. I mean, it'll be like everyone thinking they're dying, but it's allergies. Okay, but no, this never happens to me. I'm like, I'm pretty sure this does happen to you. Today, we're here with our ER, Dr. Correspondent of your Mitra, and this time he's got a story for us from the trauma bay. Yeah, so, you know, in the ER, I guess I'm lucky or cursed enough to see

all sorts of crazy things. All right, let's move them. You know, it's like everything from appendicitis to strokes to broken bones, but sometimes on your account, it's like a trauma. Like something really bad just happens to a person out of nowhere. How's that airway? Like a gunshot wound, drowning, stabbing, car crash, and all of a sudden, 300. Their life is in the balance.

So as you can imagine, when a trauma happens, your job is to act quickly. You have to think quickly. You have to get very focused very quickly. Yeah, because my job in that situation is to keep that patient alive and stabilize them, get them to the point where we can send them to the surgeon where they can get fixed up. Okay. And at this point, I feel like I can do a pretty good job of that. But that was definitely not always the case for me. I still remember one of my first trauma cases where it was a guy who just drank too much. You know, this is in New York and he was walking to catch the subway, tripped, fell onto the subway tracks and got hit by a train. Oh my God. Yeah. So like, we get the call. Ambulance brings this guy in and his feet are in a bag. Like his feet are separate from him in a bag. Oh my God. He's got a head injury, bring him onto the gurney. And I'm just like, I can't get over the fact that there are these feet in a bag, you know, and I'm looking at all the wrong things. Like I remember looking at his fingernails and just being like, Oh, his hands kind of look like mine, you know, and just all these thoughts are racing through my mind. None of them are useful. And I just froze. And I mean, I just have a ton of memories like this, you know, during my training. But the truth is, I've gotten to the point where I'm pretty good at this, like I can save a life in a trauma situation. And it's because of this different way of thinking. It's the way that we've all learned in the trauma bay, how to think. And it's pretty counterintuitive. When I looked into it, it sort of all originates from this one kind of insane story. Interesting. There's a story waiting in that, that change. There's a story. Okay. It starts with this guy's named Jim Steiner. This is in February of 1976. Jim's a doctor. He's not just any doctor. He's kind of a big deal. He's an orthopedic surgeon. He works at this big hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska. And him and his family, they're heading back from this wedding that they were just at in California. So it's him, his wife, Charlene, and he's got four kids, Chris, Kim, Rick, and Randy. I remember it was a really nice day, completely clear, you know, in California. That's, that's a really nice time of the year. This is Randy. He was seven at the time. We got to the airport and we just stand around and talk. And watch the planes come and go. You know, little, little airplanes coming in landing. I wish that I could just have a Polaroid of that moment because it was the last time we were ever going to have a moment like that. At any rate, um, eventually they get on this little six-seater plane, the B-55 Beechcraft Baron. And Jim's up in the cockpit because he's actually an amateur pilot. Whoa. Yeah. So he's flying them home to Nebraska. My dad did all his checks. He got the weather report, contacted the FAA and gave him a flight plan. And, um, we took off and headed east. So they fly through New Mexico. They go through Kansas and, uh, just, you know, just spent my time looking at the world below. And as they're coming into Nebraska, all of a sudden a pretty unexpected cloud cover just appeared and kind of started to engulf the plane. Oh, no. So now it's foggy and Jim really can't see anything. It was getting near six o'clock at this point in time. So the sun was going down and just getting darker and darker and the air pressure is changing around him. My dad had started to get a bad feeling and he decided that he was

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