On life support

Doctors fear 10 years of lifesaving advances are being put at risk by the absorption of the National Trauma Network into Te Whatu Ora.

- DONNA CHISHOLM

When Jevon Puckett began his first shift as on-call consultant surgeon at Hawke's Bay Hospital on February 21 last year, there were two sorts of cases he fervently hoped he would not have to see. One was a badly injured child. The other was a badly injured liver. "They are terrifying." 

Minutes after ambulance staff brought 19-year-old stonemason Sam Fletcher into the emergency department in Hastings at 8.45am, Puckett realised if there was a god, he wasn't paying attention that morning.

At 8.08am in Napier, Fletcher's abdomen had been crushed when he was pinned by six door-sized slabs of stone, each weighing 60-150kg, that had been destined to become kitchen benchtops. The pressure had torn off the top of his liver as effectively as a can opener would take the lid off a tin of beans.

The injury was the equivalent of a scalping to his liver, says Puckett. Fletcher, already pale from internal blood loss and unresponsive because of his plummeting blood pressure, was dying.

Fletcher's mother, Penny Taylor, driving to the hospital from Napier, says a doctor somewhat ominously called to ask her how far away she was, saying he would have her escorted past the Covid checkpoints into ED "because we don't have time".

"All hell was breaking loose. I had no idea what I was walking into. Sam was grey. He looked dead."

By 9.40am, Puckett himself had wheeled Fletcher to theatre to open his abdomen - "he had a belly full of blood" - and pack the liver to stabilise him and staunch the bleeding.