Nurse’S Trauma Drives Tough Talk She Displays Gruesome Results Of Careless Driving

Betsey Curtin could hear her son Tim screaming in the background of the videotape. He was trapped in a crumpled car. It would take 45 minutes to cut him free and eight hours for doctors to rebuild his face.

A TV news crew arrived quickly at the Deer Park accident scene. Its tape picked up more than Curtin wanted to hear.

Her other son, Mike, had been thrown from the small Toyota. Miraculously, he landed in a freshly plowed wheat field and broke only his pelvis.

The car had been T-boned by a pickup. They weren’t wearing their seat belts.

Curtin hopes other parents don’t have to go through the terror she felt that spring in 1991. For the past six years she has visited Spokane’s high schools, telling teenagers to buckle up, slow down, drive sane, drive sober and pay attention to the road.

Her presentation, “Trauma Nurses Talk Tough,” is modeled after a Portland program.

Curtin comes armed with 27 years of experience as a trauma and intensive care nurse. She’s seen the worst of the worst and has the pictures to prove it.

Thursday morning, during Ted Davies’ driver’s education class at Rogers High School, she clicked through 50 minutes of slides from accidents, emergency rooms and hospital wards. Her commentary was as powerful as the pictures.

Curtin is so good at these presentations she was given the Governor’s Recognition Award this year. The annual award is given to 12 people whose work promotes a drug-free Washington. She was one of only three people in Eastern Washington to win this year.

“The doctor declared him brain dead,” Curtin said. On the screen, a young man lay on his back swathed in bandages in an emergency room. Blood and fluid drained over his face as if his skull were an egg that had cracked.

“We asked his parents if they wanted their son to be an organ donor,” Curtin said. “I do not want to be the one that has to ask your parents this.”

She clicks to the next slide: A pair of latex-gloved hands hold two kidneys.

The vast majority of Curtin’s slides are from Spokane County accidents.

“It has to be believable,” Curtin said of the photos. “I could show them accidents where everyone survived, but they would be yawning and falling asleep.”

Another slide shows an unidentifiable bloody mass. The 30 or so students in the class audibly gasp.

“What you are looking at is her brain,” Curtin said of a teenage girl who wasn’t wearing a seat belt.

Just when the students think the photos can’t get any worse, they do.

The camera caught the naked backside of a boy as emergency crews tried to save him. His clothes had been cut away to deal with his injury - a metal pole impaling his torso.

“Yes, it’s bloody, but it’s life,” Curtin said after the slide show. “I’d rather them see these slides than go to the funeral of a friend.”

Curtin argues that her audience members are not really kids. “If you give them the keys to a car, are they kids?” she asked.

“They don’t want it sugar-coated. They want the truth,” she said. “If you give kids the right information, they’ll make the right decisions.”

She doesn’t just talk about drinking and driving. She has stories of girls who didn’t want to buckle their seat belts for fear of breaking a nail, and then being killed by a drunken driver. There are stories of boys killed because they were sober but decided to see how fast their car could go.

There is the story of the young man killed by a drunken driver while on his way to propose marriage. Firefighters found a rose, a bottle of wine and a diamond ring in the truck. He wasn’t wearing his seat belt.

There is the young mother who went driving to cool off from a fight with her husband. Her anger distracted her, she crossed the center line, had a head-on collision and ended up dead. So did her 5-year-old child.

“You don’t have to be drunk for something like this to happen,” Curtin said. “You can be angry or adjusting a stereo or anything that distracts you from driving.”

Curtin makes these presentations as a volunteer. They are her way of repaying a debt. The morning after her sons’ accident, she came back from the hospital to find an answering machine full of messages wishing the family well. Strangers had left casseroles on the steps of the family’s Deer Park home.

Her husband joined the volunteer Fire Department that had responded to her sons’ auto accident.

“He won’t admit it, but I think it’s partly payback,” she said.

Curtin and fellow Deaconess ICU nurse Sue Steadman try to hit all the high schools at least three times a year. She shows the slides again and again, unflinching. On top of that, she still deals with the broken and bloodied that come into Deaconess’ ICU.

But even this tough nurse has her limits. During her first three presentations six years ago, she showed the news tape where her son’s screaming could be heard in the background.

It was too much.

“I destroyed that tape,” she said.