logo
Joe Giordano, surgeon who helped save President Reagan's life after assassination attempt, has died

Joe Giordano, surgeon who helped save President Reagan's life after assassination attempt, has died

Independent10 hours ago
Dr. Joseph Giordano, a surgeon who played a central role in saving President Ronald Reagan's life after an assassination attempt in 1981, has died. He was 84.
He died on June 24 at a hospital in Washington, D.C. from an infection related to a lengthy illness, his family said.
Giordano was in charge of The George Washington University Hospital's trauma teams that treated Reagan after the president had been shot and badly wounded on March 30, 1981. Over the course of several dramatic hours, doctors stabilized Reagan, retrieved a bullet an inch from his heart and stanched massive internal bleeding.
'Dr. Giordano and the doctors at GW, without them, Ronald Reagan would have died,' said Jerry Parr, the president's lead Secret Service agent at the time, in a 2010 interview for the book " Rawhide Down."
Revamps GW emergency room
Giordano, the grandson of Italian immigrants, was born and raised in New Jersey. He graduated from Georgetown University in 1961 and six years later obtained a medical degree from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia.
After a stint in the U.S. Army, he joined GW as a vascular surgeon. A few weeks before he started in 1976, GW's chief of surgery told Giordano that he would have another job — fixing and managing the emergency room.
'The handling of trauma patients down there is a real mess,' his boss said.
Giordano quickly discovered that assessment was correct. Inexperienced doctors were leading inefficient medical teams. Care was haphazard. Giordano watched as at least one patient died because treatment was rendered too slowly.
Seeking out experts, he spent a month working at what would become the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center at the University of Maryland. The teams at Shock Trauma operated with speed and precision. They were methodical. He brought the approach to GW. Soon, the hospital's trauma center was regarded as among the best in the country.
'We had everything going like clockwork,' said Dr. David Gens, who helped treat Reagan and went on to a long career in trauma surgery. 'Joe had us properly trained. We had the right protocols. Everyone had a job. Organization and time are essential. So that when something happened, when the president came in, we were well organized. Thanks in part to Joe's foresight, we saved the president's life.'
'STAT to the ER'
It was a typical March Monday for Giordano when a would-be assassin, John Hinckley, Jr., opened fire on Reagan as the president left a speech at the Washington Hilton Hotel. Parr, the Secret Service agent, shoved Reagan into a limousine, and it hurtled from the scene. On the ride back to the White House, Parr realized Reagan had been hurt, perhaps from being flung into the armored Lincoln. Not knowing the extent of the injuries — doctors would soon discover he had been shot — Parr directed the limousine to the hospital.
At GW Giordano was treating a patient when the intercom began blaring: 'Dr. Giordano, STAT to the ER. Dr. Giordano, STAT to the ER.' Though he had turned over responsibility for running the emergency room to another doctor, Giordano was still in charge of the trauma teams. He knew something must be terribly wrong for him to be summoned that way.
In the ER, he found a man he recognized as the president on gurney. Nurses had already cut off Reagan's clothes and inserted IV lines. Strangely, the first thing that Giordano noticed about the president was his dark hair. It seemed so natural. 'I wondered," Giordano recalled in a 2010 interview, 'if he dyed it.'
'How are you doing, Mr. President?' he asked.
'I'm having trouble breathing,' Reagan replied.
Bleeding won't stop
Gens, a chief surgical resident, provided Giordano a quick summary of the situation: The president had been shot in the left side, his chest was filling with blood and they were about to insert a chest tube to drain the chest cavity.
Giordano did not hesitate. 'You better let me do this one.' He typically would have let a resident handle such a procedure, but he felt it would be irresponsible to put such pressure on young doctors. He made an incision eight inches below Reagan's left armpit and inserted the tube.
It relieved pressure on Reagan's lung and allowed him to breathe more easily. But the bleeding did not stop. Doctors decided they had to operate.
Giordano and Gens performed a peritoneal lavage — known as a 'belly tap' — and ensured that Reagan's abdomen was clear of blood. They then turned over the patient to a chest surgeon, Dr. Benjamin Aaron, who halted the bleeding and retrieved the bullet.
Reagan spent 11 days at GW and fully recovered from his wounds. Three others were injured in the shooting: White House Press Secretary Jim Brady; Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy; and Thomas Delahanty, a police officer.
Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity. He was confined at a psychiatric hospital until a federal judge in 2022 ordered his unconditional release.
'Today, Mr. President, we are all Republicans'
Giordano would go on to become GW's chairman of surgery, a post he held for 18 years before retiring in 2010.
That same year, he joined the board at Partner for Surgery, a nonprofit group that arranges surgery for people living in rural Guatemala. Tapping his contacts in the medical community, Giordano recruited doctors and nurses to travel to the Central American country to provide the badly needed medical services, said Frank Peterson, the group's founder. Giordano also led several medical teams on such missions.
'The one word I would use to describe him is humanitarian,' Peterson said. 'He had the skills and capabilities that made a world of difference to people who were in need.'
Though Giordano played a decisive role in saving Reagan's life, the physician may best be remembered for a line he delivered in the operating room.
Just before he was administered anesthesia, Reagan dramatically got up on an elbow, took off his oxygen mask and said, 'I hope you are all Republicans.'
Giordano, a staunch liberal, didn't miss a beat: 'Today, Mr. President, we are all Republicans.'
Years later, the surgeon jokingly reflected that "it was okay to be a Republican for a day, especially that day.'
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

After an ADHD and autism diagnosis, I now find the world more confusing. How do I make sense of this?
After an ADHD and autism diagnosis, I now find the world more confusing. How do I make sense of this?

The Guardian

time12 minutes ago

  • The Guardian

After an ADHD and autism diagnosis, I now find the world more confusing. How do I make sense of this?

I received an ADHD and autism diagnosis at the end of 2024 after a period of stress and depression. I thought that my profession was to blame (I work, however unfittingly, in finance) but have come to appreciate that I am sensitive to many kinds of environmental stressors. It has been difficult to navigate the world since the diagnosis. At first I was ecstatic, finding many of my life's complexities could be easily answered by a natural neurodivergence, but have since found the world to be even more confusing, especially where relationship dynamics are concerned. Some people I have told about my diagnosis have started to baby me slightly. Whereas before the diagnosis I might have struggled along in certain social situations, feeling myself a little bit slow off the mark, or bored, now I am starting to notice a pronounced sense of my 'otherness', which is quite scary. Do you have any advice on how to keep things in proportion after receiving news that can force you to look at life through a completely different lens? Eleanor says: What do we learn when we get a diagnosis? You say to a doctor I have experiences A through F. They say, ah, it sounds like you have condition X. And you say interesting, what's condition X? And they say well one important hallmark of condition X is where you have experiences A through F. A diagnosis can be so helpful and so emancipatory, but it doesn't necessarily leave us knowing what causes or explains our experiences. In lots of mental health diagnoses, we still don't know those things. Nor do we learn that we experience the world a particular way – we already knew that. Much of the force of the discovery is learning that the experience isn't universal, that medicine has needed to categorise them so they can be helped, explained, accommodated, and so on. Many of us feel the duality you describe after a diagnosis: understood, since we can finally name the patterns, but isolated, since we learn those names at the cost of learning they're unusual. It feels like good news and bad news at the same time. You mentioned the pronounced sense of otherness. Like being on the outside of a fishbowl looking in. One response is to resist that: othered from whom? Lots of people learn as adults that they're autistic, or have ADHD, or both; lots of people find new ways of understanding their mental experiences. As a result, there's a lot more understanding of these things than maybe ever before. That's not to say you have to take up residence in communities of the literally like-minded. It's just to say that when you meet new people, it may be that their experiences are not so different to yours. We never know what's happening in other people's minds; if it's otherness we're worried about we may be in the company of more others than we realise. Another response, though, is to allow that feeling of otherness. Similarity is helpful for connection, it's true. To that extent, it's frightening to learn that we're not so similar to others. That will make some things harder. But similarity isn't the only way to connect. You can feel reverence, awe, cherishment, for things that aren't much like you at all. Indeed, being in front of things unlike you can make you more aware of and reverent towards the contrasts in yourself. We feel this all the time with the natural world: lots of people feel deep love for, feel most themselves around, the ocean, the night sky, an animal. It's not because they seem the same as us. All that is to say: it can be precisely by standing in contrast, and not similarity, that you can simultaneously appreciate what is true of others and what is true of you. There's a kind of connection available here based on a true vision of each other, not just on being similar.

Alaska woman dies from rampant STD after infection spreads throughout her organs
Alaska woman dies from rampant STD after infection spreads throughout her organs

Daily Mail​

time25 minutes ago

  • Daily Mail​

Alaska woman dies from rampant STD after infection spreads throughout her organs

An Alaska woman has died after a rare and severe complication of gonorrhea, health officials report. The unnamed woman, who was in her 50s, died this spring from disseminated gonococcal infection (DGI), which occurs when the sexually transmitted infection gonorrhea invades the bloodstream and travels to vital organs. According to the Alaska Department of Health, the woman arrived at her local emergency department in Anchorage in heart failure and septic shock, the body's extreme overreaction to an infection. She had contracted gonorrhea, which affects 700,000 Americans a year, at some point within the previous six months. It's unclear if she had any other health issues other than opioid addiction and if she contracted gonorrhea from a long-term partner. The diagnosis of DGI only came after her death because she declined so quickly. Her cause of death was primarily due to the sepsis and heart failure. The woman's death comes as Alaska records the second-highest rate of STIs in the country, only falling behind Mississippi. Experts believe this is due to weak public health infrastructure and high rates of substance abuse, among other factors. The latest data shows 25 people per 100,000 Alaska residents have gonorrhea, and cases of syphilis have surged 20-fold since 2016. The woman in the report was one of eight Alaskans to be identified with DGI between January and May of this year, the health department said in a bulletin. They ranged in age from 32 to 59, and five of them were women. The average age was 40. There were no other recorded deaths from DGI. None of the patients in the report are thought to be connected to one another. The woman who died had been treated twice in the prior six months for opioid addiction, but there was no record of gonorrhea testing. Gonorrhea is an STI caused by the bacteria Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which spreads through bodily fluids like semen and vaginal fluids. It can move from person to person through oral sex, intercourse or sharing sex toys with an infected person. Most people with gonorrhea are between ages 15 and 24 and don't have symptoms, though the infection can cause unusual genital discharge, pain during sex, pain during urination, lower abdominal pain, itching, testicular pain in men and bleeding in between periods for women. In DGI, gonorrhea infections travel to the bloodstream and infect organs throughout the body due to the infection going untreated. DGI is thought to occur in just 0.5 percent of all gonorrhea cases. Health officials writing the Alaska report said risk factors for DGI, based on the women's medical records, were methamphetamine and opioid use, alcoholism, injected drug use, homelessness and having multiple sexual partners within a year. Cases of STIs in the US have spiked 90 percent in the last 20 years, but a recent slowdown has been observed. In a 2024 CDC report, reported cases of gonorrhea fell for a second year, declining seven percent from 2022 to below pre-pandemic levels. Alaska's health department recommends adults be tested for gonorrhea if they have at least one of the following risk factors: being under 25 years old, having a new partner, having more than one partner, previous STIs, a history of prostitution or a history of being incarcerated. And people who are sexually active and have a new partner, history of drug use or past STI should be tested every three to six months.

Foreign medical residents fill critical positions at US hospitals, but are running into visa issues
Foreign medical residents fill critical positions at US hospitals, but are running into visa issues

The Independent

time30 minutes ago

  • The Independent

Foreign medical residents fill critical positions at US hospitals, but are running into visa issues

Some hospitals in the U.S. are without essential staff because international doctors who were set to start their medical training this week were delayed by the Trump administration's travel and visa restrictions. It's unclear exactly how many foreign medical residents were unable to start their assignments, but six medical residents interviewed by The Associated Press say they've undergone years of training and work only to be stopped at the finish line by what is usually a procedural step. 'I don't want to give up,' said a permanent Canadian resident who matched to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Harrisburg but had her visa denied because she is a citizen of Afghanistan. She requested to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal. 'But the situation also seems so helpless.' Initially, the medical community was worried that hundreds of positions — many in hospitals in low-income or rural areas of the U.S. — could be affected. The pause on interviews for J-1 visas for approved work or study-related programs was lifted in mid-June. The national nonprofit that facilitates the residency match process said the visa situation is resolving, but it will take weeks to know with confidence how many medical residents have had the start of their careers derailed because they got their visa too late or were blocked by President Donald Trump's travel ban on 12 countries, according to people who coordinate the residents' training. Four foreign medical residents told the AP that U.S. embassies have been slow to open up interview slots — and some have not opened any. 'You lose out on the time you could have used to treat patients,' said one resident from Pakistan, who matched to an internal medicine program in Massachusetts and requested to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal. Thousands of foreign medical residents fill gaps in U.S. hospitals The U.S. is projected to face a physician shortage in the next 11 years, per the Association of American Medical Colleges, and foreign medical residents fill critical gaps in the health care system. More than 6,600 foreign-born international medical residents matched into U.S. programs in 2025 — the highest on record — and another 300 filled positions that were vacant after the match process was complete. Not all of those residents were affected by visa issues or the travel ban on foreign nationals from countries including Afghanistan, Haiti and Sudan. International medical graduates often take jobs in places where U.S. medical trainees tend not to go, said Donna Lamb, president of the National Resident Matching Program. 'It's not just that they're coming in and they want to work in big, flashy centers on the coast,' Lamb said. 'They're truly providing health care for all of America.' Foreign medical residents work in specialties that U.S. applicants aren't as eager to apply to. For example, international candidates make up almost 40% of residents in internal medicine, which specializes in the prevention and treatment of chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease. 'The residents are the backbone of the entire hospital,' said Dr. Zaid Alrashid from Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center in New York, which has medical residents from almost every continent. Most received their visas prior to the pause but a few were caught up in delays. Two residents from India who spoke on condition of anonymity have not been able to get an appointment at any U.S. embassies there despite the J-1 visa pause being lifted. Another resident from Egypt just secured a visa appointment for mid-August but is worried her program may not be willing to wait for her. She's already paid her security deposit for an apartment in Texas to live during her residency. "I don't know when this situation will be resolved,' said the resident, who spoke on condition of anonymity, adding she hasn't been eating or sleeping well. Hospitals waiting for residents to arrive In California, leaders at two graduate medical education programs said they have a small number of residents caught up in J-1 visa delays. Both spoke on condition of anonymity due to concerns for the doctors who are still trying to get visas. A residency leader at one large health care system said two doctors in its 150-resident program are delayed, adding they could start late or defer to next year. A 135-person program at a California public health system told the AP that one resident has yet to arrive, though he was finally scheduled for a visa interview. 'We are not going to breathe easy until he's here in our hospital,' the second leader said. As of Wednesday, Lamb's matching program had received fewer than 20 requests to defer or cancel residency contracts. Worried about losing their spots if they defer, many foreign medical residents may keep trying to get to the U.S. and start their residencies late, said Dr. Sabesan Karuppiah, a past member of the American Medical Association's International Medical Graduates Governing Council and former director of a large residency program. Some hospitals may struggle at this point to replace the residents who don't make it, leaving fewer people to care for the same number of patients, said Kimberly Pierce Burke, executive director of the Alliance of Independent Academic Medical Centers. Foreign medical trainees who've made it into the U.S. remain on edge about their situations, Karuppiah said. 'I can tell you the word on the street is: 'Do not leave the country,'' he said, adding that people are missing out on important events, seeing sick parents or even getting married. 'Everybody's scared to just leave, not knowing what's going to happen.' —- The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store