Friday, March 05, 1999

Life and death, every day

---

Emergency room doctor Rick Ryan balances demands of intense job and growing family

BY JOHN JOHNSTON
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Dr. Rick Ryan is the medical director for Jewish Hospital's emergency department. (Saed Hindash photo) | ZOOM |

        It is bitter cold, and dark. The blackness of night and blood make it difficult to see.

        University Hospital's Air Care helicopter has landed at a car crash scene. Dr. Rick Ryan is making his first run as a flight physician. He doesn't know it yet, but the man bleeding profusely through his mouth has a broken neck.

        The young doctor pulls on gloves and goes to work. He knows what to do. He has to get a tube into that man's throat so he can breath.

        That night more than seven years ago, the young Dr. Ryan and the flight team saved a life. It is a testament to his ability to work under pressure. He is cool and confident, just as doctors who specialize in emergency medicine are supposed to be. It takes a lot to shake Dr. Rick Ryan.

Tempo is tossing darts again. It's our way of testing the theory that everyone has a story worth telling. When a dart hits a name in the Cincinnati Bell Telephone white-pages directory, a reporter dials the phone number and asks if the person or persons in the home will agree to be interviewed. We did it in 1997 and again last year. This time it becomes a weekly feature, appearing on Fridays.

        Which is why you have to know about the baby.

        This is the scene another day: Dr. Ryan rushes to a hospital parking lot to meet an ambulance. Inside, is a 6-month-old child.

        He begins trying to revive the baby. The efforts continue as the child is moved into the emergency room. Fifteen minutes passes. A half hour. An hour. Still, he tries.

        Nothing.

        The child's parents are there. Dr. Ryan would explain, if he could, why he can't save this baby. Why one minute their baby seemed healthy and was sucking on a bottle; and why suddenly, something went horribly wrong. But he can't explain it. Nobody can.

        This horrible day, he's the only physician on duty in the ER. Much as he'd like to, he can't say, “No more patients today.”

        A man with a simple laceration is waiting. Dr. Ryan begins to sew him up, but stops.

        “Sir, I can't,” the doctor says. “I have to come back.”

        His hands are shaking.

        He calls his wife, Melissa. “I've got to talk to you.”

        The very first time he calls Melissa, she thinks he is a disgruntled west-sider with a sewage problem.

        It is April 1991. Melissa is a reporter for the Western Hills Press, working on a story about people with sewage in their basements.

        She realizes this caller is the doctor a colleague wants to fix her up with. She and Rick decide to meet at a movie theater. She spies on him from her car for a bit; then they see Silence of the Lambs together.

        Rick, 34, a native of West Chester County, New York, and Melissa, 30, a Cincinnati west-sider, were married in 1993. Today they live in a stone and brick house on a quiet cul-de-sac in Miami Township. The back windows offer a view of the fifth hole at Deer Run Country Club.

        That is per doctor's orders: “If we can't live on the ocean,” Rick had said, “we have to live on the golf course.”

        Usually, though, precious free time is spent as a family. They have an 18-month-old daughter, Hailey. Melissa is now a stay-at-home mom.

        “I think she has a tougher job,” Rick says.

        Melissa disputes that.

        “I can have a really bad day and be in tears,” she says, “but when he has a bad day it can be catastrophic; someone has died, or a kid comes in and they find out he has leukemia.”

        After three years of residency, flying with Air Care, Rick is the medical director for Jewish Hospital's emergency department; he also practices at University and Christ hospitals.

        In his work, every day brings a tragedy, big or small. To live it 24 hours a day is not healthy.

        “I don't bring my work home,” he says.

        “But you call me more often when it's a younger person you've taken care of,” Melissa says.

        Now that he is a father, he says he is a different doctor. More compassionate. More attuned to what the parents of a sick or injured child are thinking and feeling.

        He has salt-and-pepper hair and wears a serious look, but it softens when he gazes at Hailey, who has her mother's blond hair. She toddles toward Bell, one of the family's two Yorkshire terriers. “Big hug, big hug,” her father says, and she wraps her arms around the dog.

        Rick has recently become director of clinical operations for Vanguard Medical, a newly formed group of 35 to 40 emergency doctors at University, Jewish and Christ hospitals.

        It means more administrative work piled upon his clinical work. Which means even less time for family.

        The Ryans know they have a nice life in the suburbs. And that there are sacrifices to be made. Later, when her husband is not around, Melissa says she wants this article to say “how proud I am of him. I don't think I tell him enough.”

        You might think to ask Rick Ryan if it's worth it: the 12-hour workdays that sometimes stretch to 80-hour work weeks; the time away from loved ones, let alone the golf course; the people who aren't sick enough to be in an emergency room, but come anyway; and the heart-wrenching cases, like a 6-month-old baby who dies for no apparent reason.

        Another story: It's a busy night in the University Hospital emergency room. The staff has its hands full with two people in full cardiac arrest.

        And then a 16-year-old gunshot victim arrives.

        The boy loses blood pressure just before entering the ER.

        It's bad.

        In the operating room, Dr. Ryan draws a scalpel across the breast bone, through the nipple. He and his colleagues open the boy's chest, exposing the heart and lungs.

        Dr. Ryan can see the path the bullet took. He puts his finger inside this boy to stop the bleeding.

        And then he does what he's trained to do. He saves a life.

        “This kid walked out of the hospital a couple weeks later,” Dr. Ryan says. “That's when you know it's totally, totally worth it.”

       

       

---

West side is Cincinnati's home of chiefs
Ex-police chief faked war record
Justin's birth mother misled us, co-workers say
Most on council won't campaign for mayor-reform plan
New mayor proposal
Public schools take new attitude
Teachers' union enlists public in opposing cuts
Radiation settlement delayed by one holdout
Chronic DUI driver Jodrey makes deal
Con man solicits money in name of missing girl
Honk if you spot a lost swan
Internet seduction case goes to juvenile court
Millennium Baby an iffy proposition
Nurse vacancy rates jump this year
Uganda rangers provided false image of safety
Lewinsky helps Ch. 9 win sweeps
Judge states case for journey to Paris
Life and death, every day
'Monica's Story' here: Nothing doing
Optometrist sentenced to 4 years for fondling
Police end digging in search for body
Pupils do Ky. proud on tests
Reports on jail death differ
Taft displays youth works
Taft unveils college tax break
Being fat not a disability, judge rules in officer's firing
Big companies spew few toxic wastes, chamber says
Buses for disabled will keep running
Deerfield land decision Tuesday
Handicapped dog goes to therapy school
Independence police just looking for a home
Lakota has training for new teacher substitutes
Museum eyes old post office
Park springs from an old water plant
School flexibility on spending backed
Teen gets adult court in school fire case
TRISTATE DIGEST