Your Daughter Has Been Shot and We Need You to Come to the Emergency Room

The first time it happened, I got a phone call from the hospital. I did not believe what was being said, "your daughter has been shot and we need you to come to the emergency room", What? Who is this! Although the stranger identified where they were calling from, I thought it was a crank phone call so I hung up and got the number to the hospital emergency room myself through the telephone information number.

I called and asked if someone had called me from there and yes, they had. She was only seventeen years old. I arrived at the hospital and as I came in through one door I could see the police dragging a young man away directly opposite from me at a distance. It appeared that he was facing me but being dragged the other way. I was told that he had shot my daughter by accident.

My daughter was on an operating table in the emergency room area. I was not allowed in. I demanded the right to see my child to no avail. As I clung to the doorway to the operating room I remembered how only a few weeks ago I was in the same hospital wearing a doctor's jacket and participating in a three day Role Model Program as a Pre Med Student. I suddenly felt that I was acting unprofessionally but I did not care. That was my child in there.

Stabilized, the stretcher was rolled out and I saw my daughter briefly as I ran alongside until they reached an elevator. I was not allowed to follow. The one bullet had punctured my daughter's spleen, stomach, lung, kidney and liver. She spent the entire summer in the hospital recovering. Her lung had to be drained and she had to practice breathing with a tube that had a little ball in it. When she breathed, she had to cause the little ping pong like ball to rise.

I made a video and recorded all of the things she missed in the world while she was living in the hospital recovering from her wounds. I recorded her son who was growing up and who was too young to be allowed in the hospital. It was not that long ago when children under 14 were not allowed to visit hospitals. The rules are more relaxed nowadays. We recorded the fireworks on the 4^th of July and our visits to the hospital too. The hospital clowns were very entertaining.

Eventually my daughter made a full recovery. It was a Summer the entire family would never forget. No one wants to ever hear that their child has been shot. In this world the people who should not have guns have no problem getting one. They just don't have a license for them. Believe it or not, over ten years later I received a similar phone call again. This time the outcome was not so favorable. That you see is another story...