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Life and Death at San Francisco General
 FOR TRAUMA TEAM, SAVING LIVES IS BOTH A SOCIAL AND MEDICAL MISSION
After 13 years doing trauma surgery at San Francisco General Hospital, Dr. Andre Campbell knows just about everything there is to know about calamity, mayhem and long nights. On this Friday evening, when he was on call and tethered to the hospital until Saturday morning, his wife's leftover meat loaf -- his favorite -- represented an oasis, a pause to look forward to. So even though he was hungry, he put off eating it.
He was catching up on paperwork in his modest, cluttered office -- Campbell is General Hospital's chief of medicine and is also chairman of surgical education at UCSF, and UCSF School of Medicine graduate (class of 1985). When his beeper sounded about 7:30 p.m. on April 28. A shooting victim rode in an ambulance highballing it toward the Emergency Room three flights below. All through the hospital, the on-call trauma team hurried toward the ER.
A big man -- well over 6 feet, broad across the shoulders, with a deep chest where his frequent basso profundo laughs originate -- Campbell moved with deliberation. Panic, and the haste it engenders, is not a part of his emotional vocabulary. Emergency is his metier.
As usual, patients were lined up on gurneys to be seen in the ER; there was a second bottleneck on the third floor, of patients who were waiting for one of the 10 operating rooms. Like most of the other practitioners at the hospital, Campbell came to General to make a difference in the lives of the unfortunate.
This year, about 6,000 surgeries will be performed at General, San Francisco's only hospital to be certified as a trauma center by the American College of Surgeons -- a teaching and research hospital ready to perform emergency surgery round-the-clock. Whether you are wealthy or homeless, it is the place you will be taken if you have a serious car crash or are run over, or if your backyard grill explodes in your face. Or if you are shot, like James Hewitt.
The 14-year-old (his name has been changed to protect his privacy) was in shock, bleeding profusely and terrified when he arrived at the emergency bay. The emergency team ran him into a trauma room, lifted him unceremoniously off the gurney and ripped away his clothes. Amid the controlled chaos of shouted orders and questions, he looked up and saw a doctor bending over him, talking to him.
Campbell has a gap in his top teeth, and a long face marked by both gravitas and humor.
James asked, "Am I going to die?"
It was a question Campbell had been asked more times than he could count, and answering it never became less tense or terrible. There had been times, many times, when Campbell thought the outcome would be bad but his patient survived. There were other times, fewer but harder to forget, when a patient he expected would pull through died beneath his hands.
Seeing the fear in the eyes of this 14-year-old, Andre Campbell looked directly at him and rumbled: "I'll do the best I can."
To read the story in it’s entirety, please visit:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/12/10/MNGVOMT3NL1.DTL&hw=andre+campbell&sn=001&sc=1000
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