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Switchblade Surgery
Oblivious to the crowd breathlessly watching him work, Boll steadied his hands and continued. But the knife wouldn't cut deep enough. Out of nowhere, a man handed Boll a switchblade. It had a tapered point, nice and sharp, with a three-inch blade that locked securely into place. Boll quickly finished the cut.Then, as if she were reading his mind, Colleen handed him a tracheotomy tube. Her son, Shaun -- Pat's grandson -- has a severe lung condition and needs a tube to keep his airway clear. But he could manage without it for an hour or so.
Pat was turning bluer by the second. Colleen helped Boll gently push the tube into Pat's trachea. Seconds ticked by like minutes, but the pair worked calmly, with precision -- just like a surgical team, thought the doctor.
"I'm in," he said once the tube was finally in place.
But the crisis was far from over. Boll needed to resuscitate the unconscious woman. Fortunately, her family never went anywhere without an emergency kit containing a manual resuscitator bag, just in case Shaun has trouble breathing.
Colleen clicked the bag onto the tube and pumped. Within seconds, Pat Rohrer started breathing and the color returned to her cheeks.
As paramedics rushed in and took over, Boll stood up, trembling. He certainly hadn't anticipated anything like this when he left his job as a social worker to go to med school.
"I'm not terribly religious," Boll says now, "but I know now that God goes to turkey dinners at churches. "To take a doctor who only half knows what he's doing and give him the right tools -- I don't know how I recalled what I needed to do. To me, there's no explanation but divine intervention."
Maybe so, but Howard Stephens, assistant chief of the Mokena Fire Protection District, was quick to point out, "Without Dr. Boll, this lady wouldn't have made it."
Now that her grateful mother-in-law is back at home, with no signs of infection from the switchblade surgery, Colleen says, "We are so thankful that in this age of lawsuits, Dr. Boll was willing to put himself on the line. He just stepped up and did what had to be done."
Later that November night, after returning from the hospital, Rob Boll found another job that needed to be finished. He strolled into the church kitchen and rolled up his sleeves. Divine intervention doesn't usually come into play, he says, when it's time to do the dishes.
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