Cash Landing

"Just come to the hospital right now."

After hanging up, Gaela called her mother and one of her sisters in Hollister, Missouri, near Branson. Gaela's family had lived in the Ozarks for several years, and her dream was to move back there someday to be close to her people. In the minutes after hearing from Wofford, Gaela's emotions started taking over. On the phone with her mother and sister, Gaela began screaming "Oh, my God!" as she tried to explain what little she knew about Phil's situation.

During the five-hour drive to Kansas City, her relatives heard radio reports about a helicopter accident: In the early morning, an air ambulance had crashed near Cameron, Missouri. Details were sketchy, but four people -- a pilot, an accident victim, and two crew members -- had been involved.

"We listened to the radio all the way up," says Gaela's sister, Gena Hedgpeth. "They were saying they were all dead."

Phil Hedrick loved being in the air. On one of his first dates with Gaela, he had taken her out in a small plane. His enthusiasm as a member of the Life Flight crew was well-known at St. Luke's -- his experience and sage presence made him "Grandpa" to his co-workers. The helicopter pad was located on the roof of St. Luke's Heart Institute, and crew members had to punch the "PH" elevator button to get there. The letters stood for "penthouse," but the crew referred to them as "Phil's Helicopters." Phil was fond of the inside joke.

"Phil had an extraordinary sense of humor and dedication to his patients," Wofford recalls. "He was a very nice man. Kind of a gruff exterior, but on the inside, a marshmallow center."

The day of the crash, Wofford was supposed to be Phil's relief man. "I was waiting for Phil to come back. He never did."

But Phil did come back. Only this time he was the trauma patient.

Shortly after 4 a.m. on May 27, 1993, a Life Flight helicopter was dispatched from St. Luke's Hospital to pick up 20-year-old Sherry Letz of Bethany, Missouri, the passenger in a one-car accident earlier in the morning. The Life Flight crew -- pilot James Barnett Jr., flight nurse Sheila Roth, and Hedrick -- had left Harrison County Hospital with Letz in their care at 6:07. Just 19 minutes after takeoff, the engine popped and the helicopter fell a thousand feet to the ground in a cornfield south of a wooded section near Cameron.

When the helicopter missed a 6:37 check-in, dispatchers sent a second helicopter from St. Joseph Medical Center to search. About half an hour after the crash, two men driving along a road saw the wreckage. One of the men, a farmer, approached the helicopter and saw Roth, who was conscious and hanging out of a window. She was strapped in her seat belt. Roth asked the farmer to cut her down from the belt, and he laid her on the ground. Phil Hedrick was conscious but said he didn't want to be moved.

"How long have you been here?" the farmer asked.

"About an hour," Phil said.

Law enforcement officials found the crash at 7:40 a.m., but uncertainty about the helicopter's whereabouts delayed the arrival of paramedics. Letz and Barnett, the 40-year-old pilot, were pronounced dead at the scene and later were determined to have succumbed to massive chest injuries (though it was unclear whether Letz's fatal injuries had been caused by the second accident). Roth and Phil Hedrick were flown to Kansas City area hospitals. Phil was diverted to Liberty Hospital instead of St. Luke's because, Wofford says, Phil wasn't expected to live.

As soon as she went to Liberty, Gaela called a secretary at St. Luke's. She received little information. "I thought he was going to have a broken leg, get well, and milk it for all it's worth," she remembers.

But Phil was not in the emergency room at Liberty. Gaela was directed to see a chaplain.

"They don't call you into the chaplain unless he's dead," she says. "It was 45 minutes before they told me he was alive."

That's when Gaela calculated her husband's chances of survival.

"Life Flight is supposed to treat people in that 'golden hour,' the first hour after something happens. Phil wasn't treated in that hour," Gaela says. "Phil was alert and directing his own care at the scene, but it took too long for (paramedics) to get there. In the emergency room, they coded him for 23 minutes without life signs. He was dead for 23 minutes."

The scene at Liberty Hospital was a circus. Gaela, who had started her medical training as a combat nurse in the Army, puked in a bathroom as a crowd rushed to her side. She wanted to go into hiding as cameras, reporters, hospital officials, and authorities swarmed around her. Gaela would later be recognized by strangers in a local mall as the woman whose husband was in the Life Flight crash.

Phil had suffered severe head and internal injuries: a spinal fracture; collapsed lungs; damage to his intestines, spleen, and kidneys; broken clavicles; a cracked hip socket. He almost bled to death, but he underwent surgery and was listed in critical condition for several weeks. He spent two months in intensive care at Liberty.