Becky McCormick didn’t think too much of her headache when she laid down to take a nap on a Friday afternoon.
But when the 31-year-old resident of Pine Grove woke, she was on the floor. She couldn’t walk, and her speech was slurred.
It was May 19, 2017, the day of McCormick’s 10th wedding anniversary.
“Being in health care, I knew that if you’re in Life Lion, you’re bad,” McCormick said. “In the helicopter is when reality set in. It was like ‘Holy s***. This is real!’ But the crew kept me calm. They both talked to me the entire time and asked me to squeeze their hands and wiggle my toes.”
McCormick had been taken to the Schuylkill Medical Center in Pottsville, where she was diagnosed with a brain aneurism. Doctors determined that McCormick’s condition could be better treated at Penn State Health’s Hershey Medical Center.
It’s more than an hour drive from Pottsville to Hershey. It’s about a 12-minute flight.
The average speed of a vehicle is 60 to 70 miles per hour, but Life Lion cruises at 186 miles an hour.
“I needed help faster than an ambulance could give me,” said McCormick, who is now an emergency medical technician as part of Life Lion’s ground team. “My brain was bleeding, and they needed to get me there right now. I remember bits and pieces of the flight. I remember flying over Fort Indiantown Gap. Calculating it now, I probably wouldn’t have survived an ambulance ride.”
McCormick’s story of crisis and rapid response, and ultimately survival, is a story that exemplifies the lifesaving work that Penn State Health-Hershey’s Life Lion performs on a daily basis.
Flight paramedic Mike Kurtz has been part of Life Lion’s team since the program’s inception in 1986. He has flown thousands of missions in Penn State Health-Hershey’s “flying critical care unit,” and he’s helped save thousands of people like Becky McCormick.
“Ambulances do a great job. They can do what’s essentially needed,” Kurtz said. “But when it comes to the aircraft, there are no holds barred, more or less. The stuff we’re doing is kind of high tech for the out-of-hospital realm. When minutes matter, they call us to reduce the loss of life.”
With a sister base located in Carlisle, Penn State Health-Hershey maintains and operates three Life Lion helicopters from a hangar located on the west side of the medical center. Equipped with two hours of fuel, Life Lion services a 10-county region in central Pennsylvania, namely Dauphin, Cumberland, Perry, Lebanon, York, Lancaster, Berks, Schuylkill and Franklin counties.
“The general public wants help when they need it, but they really don’t think about what goes into it,” said Kurtz, a 62-year-old resident of Dauphin Borough. “We’re called out when Mrs. Smith is having a bad day. That’s probably the saddest moments, when you see a family gathered in a waiting room based on a split second. I’ve seen a lot in my career, but you never say you’ve seen everything.”
Goosebumps
While it responds to just about any sort of physical tragedy imaginable—on average about three a day—the majority of Life Lion calls involve vehicle accidents. By maintaining a heightened degree of preparedness and readiness, for both its medical personnel and aircraft, Life Lion can be airborne in fewer than five minutes.
The Life Lion team is comprised of highly trained paramedics, EMTs, nurses, physicians, pilots, dispatchers and mechanics.
“We can have very slow days,” Kurtz said. “Or we could be 10 hours into a 12-hour day, and all chaos breaks loose. We don’t have a crystal ball to know when people are going to need us. You’ve always got to be ready to move. We do have adrenaline spikes in this position.”
When Life Lion was established 37 years ago, it was one of the first of its kind. As aeronautical and medical technologies have evolved, so have Life Lion’s capabilities.
“There’s always a risk involved when you work against gravity,” Kurtz said. “We fly really fast, and those flights can be pretty intense. Any first responder takes on a certain level of risk. When you say goodbye to your family, you just never know. It can take a lot to save a life, and that’s the business we’re in.”
Meticulous attention to detail is a mindset that reduces human error and produces success. But when you work in a people business as a flight nurse, it becomes a way of life in which elements of humanity can never be totally eliminated.
“You’re right, I am passionate. You have to be passionate,” said Kurtz, who’s been involved as a first responder since he was a 15-year-old volunteer. “It can be stressful, but it’s rewarding 95 to 99% of the time, because we can make a difference in people’s outcomes. We can’t save everybody. We do our best. But when we can’t, we try to support family members the best we can.”
Looking ahead, it seems that the need for Life Lion’s services will continue to grow.
“I wanted to be a flight nurse since high school,” McCormick said. “When the Life Lion crew came into my hospital room that day, I said, ‘I’ve always wanted to meet you guys. Let’s chat.’ Now I’m working out of the hangar most of the time, and when I see the helicopter, I still get goosebumps. It’s different when you’ve heard the helicopter from the inside.”
For more information on Life Lion, visit www.pennstatehealth.org.
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