‘You don't expect this'

Dr. Joe Jeanette Jr. was doing paperwork on a quiet afternoon at Carl R. Darnall Army Medical Center at Fort Hood, Texas, when a commanding officer burst into his office.

“We have a mass casualty,” the commander told Jeanette. “We need you in the ER.”

Jeanette, an Army surgeon born and raised in Bellevue, sprinted to the emergency room. There he encountered what he described as controlled chaos.

Shooting victims were being wheeled in on gurneys. Some had been shot in the chest. Some had been shot in the arm. Some, sadly, were beyond saving.

Doctors and nurses were converging on the wounded, starting IVs and assessing the patients' needs.

Jeanette, the first surgeon to arrive, helped start triage. He and the other doctors and nurses identified which patients needed immediate surgery, who could wait and who needed to be transferred to other hospitals with specialties that the Army medical center doesn't have.

By around 2 p.m. last Thursday, about 30 minutes after the shooting rampage, Jeanette and his fellow surgeons began operating.

His three colleagues called on their experience as Army surgeons in Afghanistan. Jeanette called on his experience operating on shooting victims during a surgery residency at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.

Jeanette's first patient was a man with gunshot wounds to the chest and abdomen. After that, Jeanette and other surgeons worked on one shooting victim after another, not stopping until about 2 a.m. the next day.

They had to declare some patients dead on arrival in the emergency room — there was nothing that doctors could have done to save them.

But all the shooting victims operated on by the Army surgeons made it through and by this Thursday were recovering well.

“The hospital response was amazing,” he said.

For much of the time in the operating room, the doctors didn't know what had happened. They weren't aware that the suspect was an Army psychiatrist. They didn't know how many people had been killed — 13 — and how many were injured — 43 — or whether the shooting was over.

They just had to focus on saving the people in front of them.

A week later, Jeanette still was trying to process those events.

“This was just such an unfortunate and sad tragedy that the soldiers and their families had to go through,” he said.

Jeanette, 35, son of Joe Jeanette Sr. and Patty Demario, graduated in 1992 from Gross High School, where he was a state tournament-qualifying wrestler and an honorable mention all-state football player.

He graduated from the University of Nebraska at Kearney and attended medical school in Kansas City, Mo.

The Army came knocking with a deal while he was a medical student, said Jeanette's father, a former Bellevue police officer who now works for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Omaha.

If Jeanette would agree to serve after becoming a doctor, the Army would pay for his last three years of medical school. Jeanette worked as a resident at the Nebraska Medical Center from 2002 to 2006. He finished his residency in Washington state.

Jeanette, a major in the Army, has been posted at Fort Hood since July. He is scheduled to be deployed to Afghanistan in February. He expects that he'll have to deal with mass trauma there.

“You don't expect this to happen stateside,” he said. “But this could have happened anywhere.

“Since 9/11, trauma surgeons around the nation have published more about mass casualty situations and have become more educated about how to handle them. But you still don't expect them.”

From his perspective, the Army hospital managed the crisis very well, following its plan and compensating for the demands of treating so many people with such severe wounds.

For example, as a hospital that serves not only 50,000 soldiers but also about twice that many Army families and retirees, Darnall Medical Center has a large obstetrics department. Those staff members filled whatever roles were needed in the operating room. So did people from other specialties.

“I had an ophthalmologist helping me in the O.R. for a while, just for an extra hand,” Jeanette said.

Darnall Medical Center has two trauma bays, he said. It admitted about 30 people who were injured in the shootings.

In the operating room, Jeanette's pager went off numerous times. A glance showed it was his wife, Dr. Christine Anderson, calling.

He knew that she had to be watching news accounts and worried sick, and that his parents would be too. But there was no time to call.

“We were asking ourselves if he was in the middle of (the shooting), or in the middle of surgery,” Joe Jeanette Sr. said.

Dr. Jeanette finally took a moment to call his wife after his second surgery. She relayed word to Omaha that he was not hurt.

Joe Jeanette Sr. teaches a class at Metro Community College. He just completed a lesson on the effects of traumatic incidents on police and other first responders. Now his son is among the many at Fort Hood who are living through such a lesson.

Contact the writer:

444-1057, christopher.burbach@owh.com

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