Heart Doctor Saves a Mans Leg - and Life - on NYC Street

Emergencies happen anywhere, anytime, and sometimes medical professionals find themselves in situations where they are the only ones who can help. Is There a Doctor in the House? is a Medscape series telling these stories.

It started when a young woman burst into the hotel lobby from the street screaming, “My husband’s hurt! Call 9-1-1! Someone hurt my husband!”

I was on vacation in New York City with my wife and two other couples. It was Sunday, and we had just gotten up and were sitting in the hotel lobby drinking coffee and waiting for an Uber to go to brunch.

My wife Corey and I looked at each other — she’s a pediatric cardiologist. We were thinking, okay, this could be anything.

The first thing we noticed outside was a car parked right in front of the hotel. We saw blood running out from underneath the car into the gutter. A lot of blood.

Dr Kevin Stiver

I walked around the car. There was a young guy probably in his mid-20’s laying in the street, unconscious, blood pouring out of one of his legs. Blood soaked his jeans all the way up to his waist. We had no idea what had happened, we just kicked into action.

I’m a heart doctor, so I’m very familiar with anatomy in the leg. I got down and started putting pressure on his groin. As I pressed with my thumbs, I could tell that the stream of blood from his leg seemed to stop or at least improve. My wife managed his airway. A lot of other people started to gather, and someone called 9-1-1.

The guy had no visible injuries. He wasn’t cut anywhere. He wasn’t even dirty. I had no idea where he was bleeding. But I couldn’t get his jeans off without taking my hand off his leg. So we just stayed where we were. He was breathing on his own, but he was very ashen and definitely in hemorrhagic shock.

He was lying almost in the middle of the street, and we didn’t think we could move him. So, my other friends directed the traffic around us. We tried to talk to some of his family members who were there. They told us he didn’t have any medical history and was an otherwise healthy guy.

Our friends were trying to console his wife. And there was another woman there who was very distraught. She was bawling, saying, “I didn’t mean to hurt him! Is he going to be okay? Is he going to be okay?” We assumed there had been some kind of accident, but we couldn’t see any damaged cars.

It felt like I was holding pressure on his leg for hours. I kept thinking, where’s the ambulance? Why aren’t they here yet?

Finally, EMS came, and I told them everything I knew. They were able to use trauma shears to cut his jeans off. The bleed was right behind his knee and they put a tourniquet on.

But once the guy was in the ambulance, they didn’t take off. They sat there for what felt like forever. Corey and I kept telling each other, “He’s in shock. He’s got to go!” But they didn’t move. My suspicion is that they were trying to get him stabilized as much as they could while figuring out where to take him for the correct level of care.

Eventually, they took him away.

My hands and shirt had blood on them, so I changed my clothes. And then we decided to go to brunch anyway. We all just sat there. Quietly.

I was really worried that the guy wasn’t going to make it. He was so pale. He wasn’t talking with us the whole time. Corey and I thought he had been pretty close to arresting.

But I knew he had everything going for him in the sense that he was young and healthy. If anybody was going to pull off being in that situation, someone like that probably would. But the amount of the blood in the street…

I was also thinking, God, my fingers hurt. I hold pressure in groins a lot. That’s one of the things I’ve been trained to do. Normally it’s in a hospital setting. They’re on a bed, and I have leverage. But this guy was lying on the ground. I had been pushing so hard on that femoral artery trying to get the bleeding to stop, it felt like I had pulled every single muscle in my thumbs. They hurt for days.

Later that day, we went to the hotel concierge and said, “We don’t even know what hospital the guy went to, but we want to try to connect with his family.” The concierge people said, “That’s really interesting, because they’re looking for you too.” We gave them our cell phone number, and that same day the wife, Paige, called us.

Her husband — Matt — had been taken to a trauma center where they performed emergency bypass surgery to restore blood to his leg. He had gotten through the surgery fine and was going to be in the hospital for a while.

She explained what had happened to him, which is just bizarre. They live in Maryland and were in New York City for a wedding. They were about to leave, and Matt was standing behind their car loading up their luggage. The street was on an incline, with their vehicle facing downhill. The woman in the car parked behind them (uphill) released the parking brake without having her foot on the brake.

The car lurched forward and pinned Matt between the two cars. He didn’t break any bones, but he tore his ACL and snapped the popliteal artery behind his knee. Somehow, he was able to pull himself out, and then collapsed because of all the bleeding.

The surgeons told him, “Without having a medically trained person at the scene, you would have bled out so profusely you likely would have died.”

Matt and I started to FaceTime each other and now we talk every couple of months. He’s doing really well. He and Paige had their first baby, and they’re pregnant again. Every time we speak, it always comes up that he’s just so thankful I was there.

It’s something we still talk about with our friends — that if we had called that Uber driver 3 minutes sooner, we would’ve been gone. And that not only was a physician there, but the right type of physician. I had the knowledge of what was wrong and how to fix it.

These are hard things for Matt to think about though, so we try to talk about other stuff — work, current events, sports. I’m glad that we got to meet. But I don’t want to be a constant reminder to him of what could have happened.

It’s rare that you get to connect with a patient, let alone get to know each other. You usually come into a situation and leave never knowing what happened to that person. No one even asks your name. Obviously, I wish this accident had never happened. But it’s just a crazy thing how our paths crossed, how we’ve become friends.

Kevin Stiver, MD, is an interventional cardiologist with OhioHealth Physicians Group in Columbus, Ohio.

Are you a medical professional with a dramatic story outside the clinic? Medscape would love to consider your story for Is There a Doctor in the House? Please email your contact information and a short summary to [email protected] .