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MG 1 VOL 2124 number 204A

You ask for my impressions on the day of the disaster, and what I did. I am glad 'tis'impressions" and not "compressions", for it came well night being the latter; this you will see later.

It was my operating day at the Victoria General and I was there at my usual hour. With Mr. Thorne, I was "scrubbed up" in the basins immediately adjoining the operating rooms, the patient, a gall bladder case, was bein anaesthetized by Dr. Lessel. A grating, rumbling sound, different from anything I had ever heard, first aroused me to a sense of impending danger, and I stated towards a window to see if I could discern the cause. It was then the shock came. Had I remained where I was, I should have fared better, for Mr. Thorne escaped without a scratch. My movement brought me immediately under the glass skylight, and the falling glass from here gave me what injuries I received. How I escaped without very serious injuries or worse only places me with the hundreds of others who seem to have escaped serious mishap under similar, or even worse, conditions. I instinctively put my hands to my head. I thought the hallway became dark, and I had difficulty in keeping my feet. I have now a hazy recollection of moving along the hall, and down the stairways; I don't remember seeing anyone en route. With the first crash, I got the impression that the building was collapsing, and the thing to do was to get out of it.

The next link in my mental chain was in the open on the front steps of the Hospital, where the brisk morning air brought me to myself. I then discovered I was bleeding pretty freely from a wound on the top of my head, in the temporoparietal region, and that my hands too were covered with blood. A dense greyish smoke, rising like a giant pillar over the north end of the city, suggested an explosion and that a horrible disaster had occurred. I went back into the hospital, met Dr. McDonald in the hallway and he examined my wounds. The cut in my head was not bad, and apart from the immediate stunning effects of the falling missel [sic] (whatever it was) and a little aching in that region of my head for the week following, it gave me no great trouble. The cut which troubled me most was one in my left hand that exposed the extensor indicie tendon, and although it has healed wit5hout sepsis, it made movement of that hand clumsy and painful during the days I needed it most.

I went home, found my family safe, and after attending to the most emergent cases at my office, returned within an hour to the hospital. The three nurses, two of whom were in the operating room, escaped without a scratch. Miss Crosby, who with Dr. Lessel and the patent in the anaesthesia room, received a slight cut. With this exception, I was the only one of the operating staff that morning to receive some attention from the tornado of flying glass. My position under the sky-light is the explanation. neither did the patients in the wards, or nurses, suffer anything more than the slightest wounds, and the most of them came off unscathed.