DOCTORS WITHOUT POLITICS

Putting aside red and blue, doctors on the front lines of gun violence—those who do their best to knit patients back together—are teaching families how to protect themselves and others.

- BY MERYL DAVIDS LANDAU

A FEW YEARS AGO Halleh Akbarnia, M.D., M.P.H., was leaving her shift at a Chicago hospital at 1 a.m. when gunfire broke out. “As I was walking out, a car was driving by and shooting at an individual 20 feet from me. With the echoes off the buildings, it felt like it was coming directly at me,” she says. Heart pounding hard, Dr. Akbarnia bolted for the safety of her car. Luckily, neither she nor the intended target was hit, she continues, “but the shooter ended up riddling our ER windows with bullets.”

That was not Dr. Akbarnia’s first brush with gun violence, and it isn’t the main reason gun-violence prevention is important to her. When she was in middle school in St. Louis, the teenage brother of a friend of hers brought two revolvers to school and, in a classroom down the hall from the one she was in, killed one student and injured another before fatally shooting himself in front of his other classmates. While these events contributed to her experience and understanding of the issue, it was her years as an emergency room physician—witnessing firsthand the devastating toll of gun violence—that solidified her commitment to preventing it. “It’s very traumatic when we do everything we can but we can't save the person,” she says.

Chethan Sathya, M.D., a pediatric and general thoracic surgeon, is also shaken by the gun-violence patients he sees. His worst such experience was early in his career when he was called to operate on a 6-month-old girl who had been randomly shot while strapped into her car seat. “I remember my fingers on both bullet holes, blood gushing out, and the parents in horrific emotional distress,” says Dr. Sathya, who now works at Northwell Health's Cohen Children's Medical Center in New York City. The child survived but remains paralyzed from the waist down.