7.Heather Studley — Direct
100 linesHEATHER STUDLEY, duly sworn
COURT CLERK: State your name and spell your last name for the record.
HEATHER STUDLEY: It's Heather Studley, S-T-U-D-L-E-Y.
DIRECT EXAMINATION BY MR. WEINREB:
MR. WEINREB: Good afternoon.
HEATHER STUDLEY: Good afternoon.
MR. WEINREB: Doctor, where do you work?
HEATHER STUDLEY: I work at South Shore Hospital.
MR. WEINREB: For how long?
HEATHER STUDLEY: I've been at South Shore Hospital for about -- almost two years now.
MR. WEINREB: What do you do there?
HEATHER STUDLEY: I'm an emergency medicine physician.
MR. WEINREB: Please tell us where you went to school and what degrees you earned.
HEATHER STUDLEY: I went -- for undergraduate I went to Wesleyan University and I have a Bachelor of Arts. I went to Tufts Medical School -- School of Medicine, and I have an M.D.
MR. WEINREB: When did you get your M.D. from Tufts?
HEATHER STUDLEY: 2006.
MR. WEINREB: After that, did you train in any specialty?
HEATHER STUDLEY: I did. I trained at the Harvard-affiliated emergency medicine residency at the Brigham and Mass. General program, and finished in 2010.
MR. WEINREB: What is emergency medicine?
HEATHER STUDLEY: It is a staff physician who is in the emergency department trained to deal with a broad spectrum of trauma that comes in, and also non-traumatic illness.
MR. WEINREB: So typically you work in the emergency room?
HEATHER STUDLEY: I only work in the emergency, yup. I'm board-certified in emergency medicine.
MR. WEINREB: What kinds of trauma do you see in the emergency room?
HEATHER STUDLEY: Everything from minor trauma, stubbed toes, to traumatic arrests.
MR. WEINREB: I'm sorry?
HEATHER STUDLEY: Everything from minor trauma to traumatic arrests. So from shootings, car accidents. The whole gamut. Everything comes through us.
MR. WEINREB: Were you working on April 19th, 2013, at approximately one in the morning?
HEATHER STUDLEY: I was.
MR. WEINREB: Did you treat an MBTA officer who had been shot in Watertown that night?
HEATHER STUDLEY: I did.
MR. WEINREB: What was his name?
HEATHER STUDLEY: Dic Donohue. Richard Donohue.
MR. WEINREB: What was Officer Donohue's medical condition when he was brought into the emergency room?
HEATHER STUDLEY: When he arrived he was unresponsive, not breathing, and his heart was not beating. He was essentially dead.
MR. WEINREB: How did he look?
HEATHER STUDLEY: He looked dead. Pale, like you would expect.
MR. WEINREB: Like a corpse?
HEATHER STUDLEY: Yeah.
MR. WEINREB: Do you know how much earlier in the evening he had lost his life?
HEATHER STUDLEY: It's hard to say. I wasn't on the scene, but I would say based on what we saw when he arrived, it would had to have been at least, I would say, a minimum of ten to 15 minutes but probably not too much more than that. But I'm not entirely sure because I wasn't at the scene.
MR. WEINREB: Could you tell what had happened to him?
HEATHER STUDLEY: When we first examined him -- we always hear the story from -- when we first examined him we did see the gunshot wound to the groin, and when we first looked there was no bleeding there.
MR. WEINREB: What could explain the fact that there was no bleeding?
HEATHER STUDLEY: That he had bled out almost his entire blood volume on the street in Watertown, and that because his heart wasn't beating, there's no blood forward flow to cause any bleeding there.
MR. WEINREB: How much blood is in the human body?
HEATHER STUDLEY: There's about five to six liters of blood in the human body.
MR. WEINREB: Is a liter the same as a quart, a little less?
HEATHER STUDLEY: A liter -- well, when you think about blood units, usually people think about pints because that's what you donate. And I think that it's about a half of a pint in one liter so -- or the other way around. Sorry. So one liter is -- one pint is half a liter, so it's ten pints of blood.
MR. WEINREB: So ten pints of blood, approximately five quarts of blood in the human body?
HEATHER STUDLEY: Sounds about right.
MR. WEINREB: And all that was gone?
HEATHER STUDLEY: I mean, there's always going to be some residual, but, yes, for the purposes of life, that was gone.
MR. WEINREB: Were you able to bring Officer Donohue back to life?
HEATHER STUDLEY: We were.
MR. WEINREB: How did you do that?
HEATHER STUDLEY: He had continuous CPR from the pre-hospital providers and also from us when he arrived in the emergency department. We were able to put a breathing tube down to help him breathe, and we also had a large IV that we were able to place to give him lots of blood very quickly to help bring him back. And ultimately, used a medication called epinephrine which helps the heart to start to beat again.
MR. WEINREB: How long was he essentially dead?
HEATHER STUDLEY: In the emergency department, approximately 30 minutes, I would say, and then add on the pre-hospital time, anywhere -- you know, like I said, ten to fifteen minutes.
MR. WEINREB: On top of that?
HEATHER STUDLEY: On top of that, yeah.
MR. WEINREB: What happened when you got his heart beating again?
HEATHER STUDLEY: So when he started -- when he had his heart start to beat again, he started to again hemorrhage through the initial gunshot wound.
MR. WEINREB: Were you able to repair that wound in the ER?
HEATHER STUDLEY: No, we weren't able to repair; we tried to stop the bleeding with direct pressure and ultimately had to -- I had to get up on the stretcher to put my knee into the wound to get enough pressure on there because it was such a significant wound that there was no other way to stop the bleeding before he went to the operating room.
MR. WEINREB: Did he then go to the operating room?
HEATHER STUDLEY: He did then go to the operating room.
MR. WEINREB: And were surgeons able to repair his wound?
HEATHER STUDLEY: They were -- I think -- he was in the operating room for quite a while, and they were ultimately able to, I think over a couple of surgeries, repair the wound.
MR. WEINREB: Do you know what happened to the bullet that wounded him?
HEATHER STUDLEY: I believe it's still in Dic's leg.
MR. WEINREB: Is that normal, if somebody's been shot and the bullet didn't exit the body, to just leave it there?
HEATHER STUDLEY: It is. Unless they come across it in the operating room and it needs to be removed, they will often leave it, because sometimes removing the bullet can do more harm than good.
MR. WEINREB: Do you know how much blood had to be given to Officer Donohue to save him that night?
HEATHER STUDLEY: I believe he received a total of 28 units of blood.
MR. WEINREB: Twenty-eight units? That's 28 pints of blood?
HEATHER STUDLEY: Uh-huh.
MR. WEINREB: And in addition to blood, did he have to receive other constituents --
HEATHER STUDLEY: He did. He received something called fresh frozen plasma which is another blood product, which is basically the plasma of the blood minus the red cells. And I have to double-check but I think it was -- he received about -- somewhere between eight and 11 units of fresh frozen plasma as well as platelets.
MR. WEINREB: Platelets are what help blood clot?
HEATHER STUDLEY: Correct.
MR. WEINREB: How many units of platelets did he need to survive?
HEATHER STUDLEY: I believe it was six. I would have to double-check the medical record on that but I believe it was six.
MR. WEINREB: After Officer Donohue emerged from the operating room, what happened next?
HEATHER STUDLEY: He went to the intensive care unit and spent quite a lot of time in the intensive care unit initially in a medically-induced coma. He was cooled to try to preserve neurologic function. And I think he spent about a month in the intensive care unit at Mass. General -- I mean, at Mount Auburn.
MR. WEINREB: Did you follow his case after the surgery?
HEATHER STUDLEY: I did. I went -- would go up and visit him. I also was in contact with the surgeons and the other staff taking care of him.
MR. WEINREB: So after he spent a month in the intensive care unit, do you know what happened to him next?
HEATHER STUDLEY: I believe he went to Spaulding Rehab.
MR. WEINREB: What's Spaulding Rehab?
HEATHER STUDLEY: It's a high -- acute rehabilitation hospital in Boston.
MR. WEINREB: What kinds of things do they do at Spaulding Rehab?
HEATHER STUDLEY: They do everything from -- you know, all ranges of both physical rehab and people who are not quite hospital level of care but aren't ready to go home yet. I'm assuming in Dic's case it was a lot of physical rehab to get him moving. When you don't spend -- when you're in the intensive care unit, you're not moving, you're not getting up out of bed. It's very hard. It takes a long time to regain that sort of function.
MR. WEINREB: Do you know how long Officer Donohue had to remain at Spaulding Rehab before he could go home?
HEATHER STUDLEY: I do not know how long he was there.
MR. WEINREB: Thank you, Doctor. I have no further questions.
MR. WATKINS: Thank you. No questions.
THE COURT: All right, Doctor. Thank you. You may step down.
HEATHER STUDLEY: Thank you.
(The witness is excused.)
MR. CHAKRAVARTY: The government calls Major Frank Hughes.