Virginia Air Ambulance Saving Lives, One Flight at a Time

Larry Saunders had given up.

Tended by paramedics whose harried words confirmed his fears, the Gloucester man felt life draining away after a horrific accident.

"I remember laying there saying a short prayer and saying goodbye to my family," Saunders said.

Then Nightingale landed. "I saw this warm, smiling face with a helmet on," Saunders said.

Flight paramedic Jim Laing "leaned over and started talking to me . ... You can sense confidence in a person's voice, and he just turned around my thinking 180 degrees .

"From that moment on," Saunders said, "I knew I was going to make it."

He became a statistic - a good one - as one of more than 14,000 people who have been sped to medical care by Nightingale since the aeromedical ambulance service began flying 25 years ago from what is now Sentara Norfolk General Hospital.

At 11 a.m. Tuesday , Nightingale's achievements will be marked at an invitation-only celebration at the Sentara Williamsburg Regional Medical Center .

"If Nightingale is ever compromised in any way, God be with the accident victims," Saunders said, "because they are more likely to end up as fatalities."

Like so many Nightingale passengers, Saunders had no idea an hour earlier that death was imminent.

It was Jan. 10, 2004. "A Saturday," he remembered. "I was working around my home with a tractor and an auger, setting some fence posts."

He had just centered the auger and started it swiftly spinning to dig a new hole when it lurched, having apparently hit a root. "I threw my arm up to block my head from being hit and it caught my glove. It pulled me right in."

Suddenly, "I was spinning around and around," Saunders said. "I could hear my bones breaking."

His wife, Susan, who died in July, happened to be watching from the kitchen window and ran outside, alerting their two sons. Jason and Matthew Saunders shut down the auger and used their belts as tourniquets on their father's thighs to stem the bleeding.

Paramedics arrived in a few minutes.

"Your hearing is supersensitive at times like that," Saunders said. "I just knew by listening to them that I was not going to make it."

They ticked off a grim laundry list of injuries as they called for Nightingale. One leg severed, the other mangled; a collapsed lung; a crushed arm; a mauled back.

Aboard Nightingale, however, Laing kept Saunders' attention and boosted his morale.

"He said, 'We've got one of the best trauma units waiting just for you when we get over to Norfolk General. Don't worry,'" Saunders said.

After weeks of intensive care, seven surgeries and months of rehabilitation, the former Marine Corps pilot is not only walking again with a prosthetic, but also back to flying small planes, including his Cessna.

He credits everyone who helped him - his family, the ground crews, the surgeons and medical staff - for his survival and recovery.

But especially Nightingale .

The air ambulance and its crew have many loyal friends .

Since its inception, Nightingale has carried some 14,400 patients, said Chris Cannon, 39, Nightingale's manager and one of its flight nurses.

All without an accident or major incident.

"Our successes are those of a whole team system of which we are just one part," Cannon said, including the emergency personnel who first arrive on a call and medical teams at the hospitals.

Three different helicopters have been called Nightingale over the years; the most recent came on line in 1996.

Today's chopper "is a flying critical care unit," Cannon said, able to handle most any patient, irrespective of malady.

Each flight crew includes a pilot, nurse and paramedic.

Cannon said the paramedics typically have at least a decade of experience "that brings the strength of working in the field in accident scenes ."

Nurses come from the hospital environment, often with experience in critical care .

"You combine the two and it really fits most of the flights we do," Cannon said, "whether we are going to scenes or doing hospital transfers."