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Oct 31, 2007 11:00 pm US/Eastern
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Health: Real-Life Drama Of The Emergency Room
PHILADELPHIA (CBS 3) ―
Dealing with violence is an every day job for some. On the front lines are the doctors and nurses who treat gun shot victims in city hospitals.
Medical Reporter Stephanie Stahl has an inside look at the battle to save lives and one young nurse who fears for her own life.
When three people were shot at 15th and Sansom Tuesday night, Lizanne Smylie, a nurse who was in a nearby restaurant, ran to help one victim who had a gun shot wound to the chest.
"Stop the bleeding, just applying pressure to the gunshot wounds, but that's really all we could do," Smylie, a nurse at Hahnemann University Hospital.
Smylie said she's become used to seeing gun shot wounds. This time while she was trying to save the man's life, she feared for her own.
"I really felt as though maybe this isn't over and that someone could be coming by to finish whatever they started, that's when fear set in," Smylie explained.
She's learning to live with fear, seeing so much gun violence inside the hospital and on the streets.
"It just seems like everywhere isn't really safe and that's sad, that makes me sad because I've lived here all my life and I never felt that before," Smylie said.
Dr. Joseph Karam, the chief of trauma at Hahnemann said all the the violence makes life in the E.R. especially busy and difficult, confronting the ugly reality of the kinds of injuries guns are causing.
With the shootings mounting, it is the kind of devastation hospitals see all too often.
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