Doctor Controls Chaos After Fatal Backroad Crash

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.

My fiancé and I were driving back from a wedding in Vermont. We were on one of those fast, two-lane roads in the middle of nowhere. Suddenly, we watched the SUV in front of us veer over the midline and hit two oncoming SUVs essentially straight on. 

It was horrifying. We slammed on the brakes and thankfully, avoided being part of the accident. My fiancé called 911. I jumped out of the car to see if I could help. 

The first vehicle was pushed up against a guardrail. I couldn’t open any of the doors on either side. I opened the back, and it was like a wave of screaming kids. There were multiple children inside. I was able to say, “Hi, I’m Kiley. I’m an ER doctor. It’s going to be okay. Can you unbuckle and climb out?”

I got a few kids out through the back. The parents, who had been in the front, managed to hand me a baby through the back. I brought the children over to where my car was parked. Somebody else had stopped and stayed with them while the parents crawled out. Everybody in that car was okay. 

My fiancé had gotten off the phone with 911, so we both went to the next vehicle, which was badly damaged. There was an older woman in the back seat, unconscious. Her granddaughter was next to her, still buckled in, looking scared. There was also a boy in the front seat who seemed okay. An older gentleman had been driving, and he looked badly injured. We got them all out.

We went to the last vehicle where there were more kids and a few adults. Some were injured, but we were able to get them out. 

We had a total of 14 patients. It was chaos. But as an ER doctor, it was familiar. I see stuff like this all day every day … and yet it was still horrifying. 

We started to triage everyone, figuring out who needed to go to the hospital first and what type of care they needed. In order to protect patient privacy, I won’t describe the injuries in detail. But some were very serious, and it was easy to see the older couple had to go first.

It felt like forever before anyone else got there to help. Luckily, my fiancé is a physiatry resident, so he also has medical training. We were just running around trying to assess who needed what, who was the sickest, and who we needed to help.

We were also out in the middle of nowhere without any supplies. But I had my EMT bag in the back of my car. I’ve been an EMT since I was 16, and I always have a kit. But there’s only so much you can carry with you.

I also was wearing a little pink sundress and flip flops while running around saying, “Hi, I’m an ER doctor.” It didn’t quite fit the part.

By the time the first ambulance and the firefighters started to arrive, we had triaged everybody. I knew some were in trouble.

We were about 45 minutes away from the closest hospital, so it was a frustratingly slow process. One ambulance would come, and then we would wait 5 or 10 minutes for the next one. At least the EMTs had airway management equipment, so I climbed in an ambulance and tried to stabilize the airway of one of the patients. Finally, the paramedics got there and took over.

The kids worried me because the whole thing was traumatic. I kept checking on them, especially one of the girls who was about 12. She was laying on the pavement. A younger girl about 10 was helping her even though they didn’t know each other. It was heartwarming to see. We were in this crazy situation, but a 10-year-old girl was sitting there holding another child’s hand, telling her she’s going to be okay. 

It was more than an hour before all the patients were on their way to the hospital. We gave formal statements to the police. And then we had a very nervous 5-hour drive back to Philadelphia.

The next day, the sheriff called and was able to give me an update. There had been two fatalities in the accident. One, I knew had been pronounced on scene. The other, I had gotten him into an ambulance and on the way to a helicopter, but he didn’t make it.

Thankfully, everybody else was okay, and none of the kids were badly injured. 

The sheriff asked if he could give my phone number to one of the families involved, and I spoke with them a couple of weeks later. It was the mother of that 12-year-old girl. She said that her daughter remembers me as the nice lady in the pink dress who helped her. That made me emotional, of course. I thought, I did something good.

Talking about it and reliving it helps me to process everything I saw. The memories are terrible. Opening the back of a car and having four screaming children crawl out, and what they saw. Some of the images are too much to think about. But it’s also why you go into medicine in the first place.

For me, the reason was another car accident many years ago. It was the day after my 13th birthday. One of my brother’s best friends was hit by a car right in front of my house while crossing the street on his bicycle. He was 14.

The boy was seriously injured. But my 16-year-old sister was doing her EMT training at the time. She ran to him and was able to do the bare minimum of assessing vitals and helping him. He had to be Life Flighted and was in the hospital for over a month. But he made it.

Watching that scene, I said, “I’m going to be an EMT. I want to know what to do in these situations.” So, I became an EMT. And then I said, “I’m going to be a doctor. I want to know more about what to do in these situations.” I want to help people on the worst day of their lives and to hopefully make things a little bit better: like how that little girl can remember one peaceful moment out of a horrible, horrible day.

When these things happen, there’s a switch that flips. You instantly revert back to your training. You also revert back to just being a good human being.

Kiley Nygren, DO, is an emergency medicine resident at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia. 

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 access@webmd.net. 

Read more in the series:

A Doctor Gets the Save When a Little League Umpire Collapses

Vacationing Doctors Intervene After a Savage Shark Attack

“Blood Everywhere”: Nurses Control Intense In-Flight Crisis

Read the entire series here.