ORLANDO, Fla. – The mass shooting Sunday at an Orlando nightclub made for a more than busy night at trauma centers around the city. They were inundated with victims.
Orlando Regional Medical Center was the hospital that treated the most victims, about 44 total.
Doctors said they were first told Sunday that about 20 people had been wounded, but that number quickly multiplied. They had a total of 44 wounded by gunshots. Orlando Regional normally has three operating rooms open at the same time, but once doctors and staff saw how many victims were coming in, within 90 minutes, they were up to 6 operating rooms.
Dr. Chadwick Smith said they performed about 26 operations within the first few hours. One patient had four separate operations, and more than 90 units of blood.
Dr. Joshua Corsa posted a heart wrenching photo on Facebook that has gone viral. The post read in part:
"These are my work shoes from Saturday night. They are brand new, not even a week old. I came to work this morning and saw these in the corner my call room, next to the pile of dirty scrubs.
I had forgotten about them until now. On these shoes, soaked between its fibers, is the blood of 54 innocent human beings. I don't know which were straight, which were gay, which were black, or which were Hispanic. What I do know is that they came to us in wave upon wave of suffering, screaming, and death. And somehow, in that chaos, doctors, nurses, technicians, police, paramedics, and others, performed super human feats of compassion and care."
The post went on to thank all of the first responders and medical staff that remained calm, organized, and saved so many lives, but not everyone could be saved. A total of 49 victims died. Some were trying to communicate until the very end. Several people asked if they were going to die, where their friends were, where their loved ones were.
After the shooting, the hospital was placed on temporary lockdown because hospital officials thought that there might have been a shooter inside. At one point, the facility was on such high alert that it stopped accepting patients, doctors said. Some doctors described putting X-ray machines in front of doors as barricades.