It’s National Trauma Awareness Month and one hospital in Osceola County is celebrating the lives they’ve saved.

  • Osceola Regional Medical Center event reunited trauma patients with doctors
  • Hospital is a level 2 trauma center
  • Accident hospitalized Liza Thompson, doctors saved her life

An X-ray provided to us by Liza Thompson shows a pelvis filled with nails, something you may see in a medical TV drama. But this radiography represents a reality for Thompson.

“My pelvis was shattered so I had six fractures in my pelvis, my tailbone, my L5, both wrists, my forearms and a lot of internal bleeding,” Thompson said.

 


An X-ray shows the nails holding together Liza Thompson's pelvis after an accident.

 

She’s one of 3,000 patients who received critical care at Osceola Regional Medical Center in the last two years as a level 2 trauma patient.

The hospital hosted an event in which many of these trauma patients reunited with the doctors who treated them.

“We become part of the family in this case. You work so close. You see the family suffer, you suffer with them,” said Dr. Pedro Ramirez a Neurosurgeon at Osceola Regional. “You bring them back to life. And it’s the best reward that we can get is to see them back with their family.”

Thompson is forever grateful to the staff at Osceola Regional. A car accident on State Road 417 during which she crashed into a construction site left her unconscious for days.

Her purse holding her driver's license could not be retrieved for weeks. She told us it was her Intensive Care Unit nurse that identified her using Facebook and contacted her family.

“They came in here, they repaired me as fast as they could. And kept me alive and I am very grateful for that. Because I feel I have a second chance,” she explained.

Thompson moves around with the help of a wheelchair and a walker right now, but she plans to do so much more with her second chance.

“I feel pretty good right now and I feel very very hopeful and I will be walking very, very soon,” Thompson said.

Osceola Regional Medical Center is currently building an inpatient rehab center for patients like Thompson. It’s expected to open by the end of the year.