Montgomery emergency room physician talks about treating record number of gunshot victims

Posted: Jun 24, 2024 11:32 PM CDT

by
Estee Morrison, WAKA Action 8 News

Emergency Room doctors and nurses are dealing with a record number of gunshot victims in Montgomery. Dr. AJ Burandt, an emergency medicine physician at Baptist South Hospital, told us about his experience trying to save lives everyday. Dr. Burandt says, “Their friends sometimes literally just drop them off unconsciously and you just see blood on them and you don’t know what happened and here you go.”

Dr. AJ Burandt spent 5 years in hospitals in Detroit training to become an Emergency Medicine physician. “Unfortunately I take care of more gunshot victims and victims of violent crime here than I do in Detroit. And I have a lot of friends back home who are ER doctors, and we share stories, and unfortunately my stories always trump theirs. Pretty eye-opening,” said Burandt.

Dr. Burandt worked the weekend shift June 14 through June 16 at Baptist South’s Emergency Room, and 18 people came in with gunshot wounds. “After I got off Monday morning, I was just exhausted. I couldn’t even remember them all. So I was like, I want to go through and I don’t want to make up numbers. I want to actually see. So I went through our roster of people, and eighteen had checked in from Friday night to Monday morning with a chief complaint of a gunshot. I probably took care of personally maybe half of those and my partners the other half. Everything from, you know, sometimes you get shot in the leg and get ‘lucky’ and go home, all the way to your paralyzed from the neck down, to you’re dead. Every injury in between,” Burandt said.

“Very often I would say it’s not just an isolated incident. You have one. And then two more. And then another. And then a transfer from another place, and whether it’s retaliatory or from the same incident, very few times is it that just one comes in and that’s it,” Burandt said. One case he recently treated was especially shocking. “A few months ago, we walked into a room and it was a 911 trauma. We took care of him, and I went back to the computer, and (realized) he was a teenager Dr. Vermillion and I had seen three times in the last six months. All for gunshots. It was the third time we had taken care of the same person, and he hadn’t even been of age to finish high school.”

Burandt says the toughest part of his job is telling family members that their loved one has passed away. “I dread it, because I know that I’m going to be that last point in time – talking to that mom or brother or sister – where they were normal. As soon as I open my mouth and say those words, ‘your son is dead’ or ‘your daughter is dead,’ their life is changed forever and I’m that last face that they will see. I deliver that news all the time now. It’s not just a rare occurrence like once a month. It’s all the time now where you’re delivering news like that. It’s awful. It’s awful.” Baptist South Hospital has ER residents come from hospitals around the state to train because of the number of traumas and gunshot victims they deal with on a regular basis.