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Tgh Finances
Last year, TGH's trauma center lost $8-million treating accident victims such as Benjamin Harris.
By DAVID KARP
© St. Petersburg Times, published April 9, 2000
One day, they were teenagers, munching on cereal, making plans with friends, and cruising in a new black Honda CRX hatchback down lonely Keysville Road. Then, Charles Wingate made the kind of decision 16-year-olds make at least once.
He tried passing a school bus and blew through a stop sign. A 40-ton tanker truck slammed into the Honda that Wingate was driving with his 15-year-old friend, Benjamin Harris, at his side.
Car wrecks happen almost every day, but only the worst get more than a paragraph's mention in the newspaper. But when that car crash happens to a member of your family -- a witty, life-of-the-party boy with strawberry blond hair -- it means the world. Any family would marshal every resource possible to repair a son.
In west Central Florida, that task usually falls to Tampa General Hospital. Its Level 1 trauma center sees 2,500 patients a year -- two-thirds of all the trauma cases in Hillsborough County, according to the county's independent trauma agency. And the hospital's reach is even wider: 57 percent of TGH's trauma patients live outside Hillsborough County.
On March 22, when Harris, who lives in Lakeland, was hurt on Keysville Road, a helicopter took him to TGH. His friend, Charles Wingate, died in the wreck.
A team of three surgeons, five physicians, four nurses and two X-ray technicians was preparing in the TGH emergency room for Harris to arrive. He was in shock, his spleen was bleeding, his liver had deep wounds, and his brain was damaged.
"I honestly did not expect him to make it," said Dr. Lewis Flint, a retired Army captain who treated wounded soldiers in Vietnam and now runs the TGH trauma center.
Doctors operated for six hours the first day, and a doctor was at Harris' bedside all night. It took 15 hours to stabilize him.
After 18 days in the intensive care unit, Harris was still in critical condition Saturday night. "He is one of the most badly injured people I have seen survive this long," said Flint. "We will do everything we can and then hope for the best."
No one has mentioned a bill. It's not part of the doctors' calculations. Last year, the trauma center lost $8-million treating car accident victims such as Harris.
Harris' family lives in a mobile home park in Lakeland and doesn't have health insurance. Friends have been handing out fliers to raise money for the medical bills. It won't come close.
His 20-year-old sister, Elizabeth, slept in the ICU waiting room for a week to be near him. She thought about the recent $81-million Lotto jackpot. Most people, she figured, would spend it on new cars or some other luxury.
Harris knew what she would do: Give almost all of it to the hospital.
"They deserve it," she said.