- THE ALUMNI MAGAZINE OF AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL COLLEGE
Bird’s Eye Enterprise
April 12, 2021
Paying it Forward
April 16, 2021
HE’D BEEN SHOT BEFORE. In fact, the bullet was still inside him, tucked against his spine. But it hadn’t caused any problems, so there was no real need to go fishing it out.
His latest gunshot wound, though, was causing big problems in the form of an abdominal abscess and a blood clot in his hip that left his leg swollen, cold, nearly pulseless, and at increasing risk of amputation. When Ashley Weisse ’14, a physician assistant in Hartford (Connecticut) Hospital’s Level I trauma center, told him he might lose his leg, he said he’d rather die.
And when a CAT scan revealed that the old bullet had also become infected, and that the infection was spreading to his spine, causing osteomyelitis, which would require a mini-mum of six weeks of intravenous antibiotics, he still refused care—vehemently.
“He was swearing at the staff, he was combative, argumentative, obstructive to his own care,” Weisse remembers. “But his injuries carried such a great risk that my team and I went above and beyond to really figure out what the barrier was.”
Top: Weisse during deployment, 2007. Right: Weisse with late fiancé Sam Kelsey on day of latter's deployment, 2007.
The barriers were many. First, he was—quite understandably—struggling to interpret the medical information coming at him from all directions; he didn’t know what abscess meant, for example. Also, he—quite rightly—feared for his life. And, on top of it all, his mom, a bipolar schizophrenic, was vowing to retaliate against her son’s shooter.
“My mother is more important to me than my life,” he told Weisse’s team, whose empathetic prodding ultimately convinced him to stay a few more days and receive IV blood clot medication before they released him to outpatient care.
“That was one of my first patients,” Weisse says. “So much has happened since then.”
WEISSE DROPPED OUT of high school at the age of seventeen and joined the Army. She left for boot camp in early 2006 and was stationed at Fort Stewart, Georgia, where she met Sam Kelsey, a combat engineer who soon became her fiancé. The following November, the Democrats reclaimed both the House and Senate in a midterm election that was widely considered a referendum on the Iraq War.
Two months later, President George W. Bush announced a troop surge, labelled “The New Way Forward,” to include twenty thousand additional soldiers. “I was there,” Weisse says of her deployment, “and I don’t exactly know why.”
Forward Operating Base Kalsu, in Iskandariya, Iraq, where Weisse was stationed during deployment.
She was stationed with the 3d infantry division at Forward Operating Base Kalsu in rural Iskandariya, twenty miles south of Baghdad. There, she served missions with a gun truck unit, worked security forces for Iraq’s first democratic election, taught the local police force basic life support, and built and staffed an aid station for soldiers and locals alike. As a combat medic, she endured monthslong lulls between onslaughts of activity. She compares her responsibilities to a peacetime paramedic: “We didn’t do surgery. We didn’t do definitive care. My job was to get you situated enough to get you in a helicopter or in a humvee to get you to someone else.” Sometimes, getting a patient “situated” meant performing such intricate—and gory—procedures as facial sutures in the dusty Iraqi countryside. “You don’t know what you don’t know,” she retrospects.
On December 13, 2007, three months into their tour, Kelsey was killed by an improvised explosive device while on foot patrol in Tunis. Weisse returned to the States for a memorial service at Fort Stewart’s Warriors Walk before returning to Iraq. She was honorably discharged after two tours, in 2009.
Like many returning veterans, Weisse struggled to reintegrate into civilian life. “I was so young when I joined,” she says. “I wasn’t completely naïve, but definitely naïve to worldly matters. I didn’t have any concept of trauma or PTSD. I was in an infantry unit where you didn’t talk about your feelings, and I didn’t have the emotional maturity or vocabulary or courage to be open.”
She found solace in her local Vet Center, one of three hundred community-based counseling and outreach venues run by the Department of Veterans Affairs. She participates in an Iraq-Afghanistan veterans group and was part of a ski and snowboard group. “There’s a camaraderie in being in the service; then there’s a camaraderie in being in the service and deploying; then there’s a camaraderie in being in the service, deploying, and experiencing significant trauma,” she says. “The Vet Center saved my life.”
February 14, 2017: Weisse and Kyle, during their wedding ceremony on Mount Snow in southern Vermont.
AFTER TWO YEARS at Springfield Technical Community College, Weisse enrolled in AIC’s nursing program before switching her major to social sciences. “My vision of what nursing would be in the civilian world was different than what the reality of it is,” she says. “I wanted to be part of the decision-making process, I wanted to be part of the prescribing, I wanted to do surgery.”
She went on to earn a master of public health from Southern New Hampshire University in 2016 and a master of science in physician assistant (PA) studies from Westfield State University in 2019. She began at Hartford Hospital the same year.
THE PA PROFESSION is relatively young and closely tied to the military. In 1965, addressing a national shortage of primary care doctors, the late Eugene A. Stead Jr., MD, then at Duke University Medical Center, modelled the first PA curriculum on the fast-tracking of doctors during World War II. His first cohort consisted of four Navy Hospital Corpsmen.
Weisse says a “mixture” of her personality and military background drew her to trauma work, through which she gets to treat what she gently calls “adverse populations.” She expounds a bit: “People who get shot and stabbed generally have other issues in their lives.”
Such “adverse populations,” due to social determinants like economic precarity, are also at a higher risk of exposure to COVID-19. Weisse herself contracted the virus in November and was bed-ridden for nearly three weeks. Yet despite the risk she inherits by trade, she quickly deflects praise to other essential workers. A lonely upside to this pandemic, she says, is “it’s highlighted, really, some of what hands-on people do. A custodian might not otherwise get the recognition they deserve, but now they do.”
Weisse with siblings Maggie and Tommy, mother Laurie, and children Ryan and Finn, 2019.
“YOU KNOW HOW MANY PEOPLE I’ve had that have tried to stab themselves to death recently?” Weisse asks—rhetorically, to be sure. “At least eight to ten.”
Of note was a patient with severe mental illness who tried to stab his heart with a steak knife. When emergency medical services wheeled him into the trauma center, the knife was still stuck in his chest. “Every time his heart beat, the steak knife moved,” she says. In the operating room, the cardiothoracic surgeon told her the knife had just “tickled” his heart.
“Think about that guy. He’s got mental health issues, he’s got all these medical issues,” Weisse says. “I can’t fix the medical or mental health. I can fix the trauma piece, but then those other aspects play into my care with him. It makes it so much more dynamic. If you’re in cardiology, you deal with the heart; if you’re in neurology or neurosurgery, you deal with the head and that’s it. We collaborate with all those guys, we work with all of them.”
She adds, “I love my job, dude.”
