Montreal Trauma Unit Went on Alert after Shooting Rampage

MONTREAL (CP) - This is the story of an unheralded army - the soldiers of life who battled to defeat the self-described ''Angel of Death.''

Gunman Kimveer Gill, who blasted his way into a Montreal college, stole the life of a young girl and grabbed national and international headlines for several days.

But local medical workers toiled in anonymity to steal something back - the pieces of his gory legacy, one saved patient at a time.

The death toll remained stalled at one single victim as they worked around the clock, first in speeding ambulances, then in blood-soaked trauma units and finally in crowded operating rooms.

The announcement of impending chaos boomed over the loudspeakers at Montreal General Hospital shortly after 12:45 p.m. Wednesday: ''Code Orange.''

Patients might have missed it. But to hospital staff it was an unmistakable call to action, one they'd heard just once in the last decade - a preventive warning on 9-11.

Nurse Nancy Branco, who was off-duty but visiting a supervisor Wednesday, said in an interview she understood the significance immediately.

''There's been a disaster somewhere,'' she recalls thinking at the time.

''There will be an influx of patients.''

In the parking lot, just outside the entrance and down the corridor from the trauma unit, the ambulances began rolling in.

To be more precise, they screeched in.

Emergency drivers normally drive fast but this time about a dozen of them literally tore into the parking lot at such speed that hospital staff feared they would smash into the building's brick facade.

''We thought they were going to come through the wall,'' said one worker.

Inside, nurses scrambled to clear room for the impending masses.

They dashed from bed to bed, scanning the personal charts of existing patients to determine which ones could be moved upstairs from the ground-level emergency ward.

Porters arrived to whisk away the less critical ones, wheeling their beds into the elevator and up to rooms on the fifth floor.

Then the victims arrived. At least 11 of them rolled down the hallway.

One had taken a gun blast in the head, others had gaping abdomen wounds, some oozed blood from their chest, and a number had limbs punctured by bullets. As of Saturday, none of the wounded had died but two remained in comas and were in critical condition in the hospital's intensive care unit.

''It was this wave of patients,'' Anne Thomas, interim head nurse at the hospital, said in an interview.

Thomas said two of the on-duty nurses had children at Dawson.

''They had to see each patient, take a deep breath, and say, 'Okay, I can go on.'

''(Trauma treatment) is always hard, but it's even harder when you're thinking the next ambulance could be carrying your child.''

That horror scenario averted, hospital staff raced to their patients while struggling to shake other fears: Was there another shooter on the loose? Was it an act of terrorism? Would the hospital need additional security?

But any meandering thoughts and scare scenarios in their minds were cut short by the grim onslaught of real-life sights and sounds before their eyes.

One patient hollered and described in vivid detail what had happened at the school. One asked to see his girlfriend.

Pools of blood were splattered across the white floor of the ambulatory unit, a classroom-sized chamber where the three most critical patients were cared for on beds beneath cream-coloured X-ray machines.

''It was a bit like a war zone for a while,'' Branco said. ''A controlled war zone.''

A personal team attended to each patient. The more critical ones had two nurses and two doctors hovering above them, their blue or green hospital scrubs soaked crimson with blood stains.

Dr. Bruno Bernardin raised his hand and shouted out to the assembled staff: ''I'm the TTL (trauma team leader)! Everything goes through me.''