GALVESTON — Lois Killewich is accustomed to seeing catastrophic injuries in the operating room.
But helping to keep a man from bleeding to death on the way home from work is a little less common.
On Thursday, Killewich, a cardiovascular surgeon at the University of Texas Medical Branch, and her husband, Jim Gregory were driving back to their West End house when they came on the scene of a motorcycle accident.
David Ford, 49, and his wife Cheryl, 52, were headed west on FM 3005 on their 2007 Harley Davidson when they hit the back of a truck.
The first responders hadn’t arrived yet, but Killewich immediately saw David Ford laying in the middle of the road. His leg was amputated below the knee.
Someone else who had stopped had tied a tourniquet around the leg, but Killewich knew it would not help if he started bleeding profusely from the popliteal artery, which runs behind the knee and supplies most of the blood to the bottom half of the leg.
“If it’s ripped in half, you can died from that,” she said, estimating that it would only take about 15 minutes for someone to bleed to death if the artery was not tied off.
Although there was a big pool of blood on the road already, Ford was not bleeding heavily when Killewich started giving him heart compressions, she said.
When the ambulance arrived and the emergency technicians started giving him fluids, Ford began to bleed heavily, she said.
The tourniquet was not working, so Killewich reached up behind Ford’s knee, pulled down the artery and held it until someone could give her a piece of gauze to tie it off with.
“I’ve dealt with incidents of that nature hundreds of times in the operating room,” she said. “But that is the most serious incident I’ve dealt with outside the hospital in my whole career, and I’ve been around for 25 years.”
While Killewich was working to save Ford’s life, Gregory, who is not a doctor, was working to save the rest of his leg.
Covered in blood from helping to tie the tourniquet, Gregory walked down the line of traffic stopped by the accident hoping someone would have an ice chest. Most drivers wouldn’t even roll down their window, Gregory said.
But one man who looked like a day laborer immediately jumped out of his truck, emptied out the contents of his ice chest and handed it over.
“We should reward people like that who just try to do what they can to help others,” Gregory said.
Although the medical branch, which has been mostly shut down since Hurricane Ike, has gotten a lot of attention for what it’s not doing these days, what happened Thursday proved that the hospital and its staff are still here for the health of the island, Killewich said.
Both David and Cheryl Ford were flow to Houston’s Memorial Hermann Hospital. Cheryl Ford was listed in stable condition Friday, but officials would not release any information about her husband.
