A friend and former colleague of mine at Times/Review — who was just named Writer of the Year by the New York Press Association, by the way — always used to say, “One thing I know about news. It doesn’t happen at my desk.”
I was reminded of Julie Lane’s words of wisdom yesterday as my day unfolded inside Peconic Bay Medical Center. My daughter needed an appendectomy. We arrived in the emergency room at about 2 a.m. and spent most of the day there, waiting for surgery.
The PBMC emergency room is a happening place. It would definitely be a good place to troll for news — if you weren’t there because of some family emergency of your own, of course. People are rushed in after car accidents, beatings, stabbings, even shootings. The hospital’s proximity to the jail means there’s almost always a prisoner or two in-house. And, of course, there are the much more mundane and ordinary things like alcohol overdoses, heart attacks and, yes, appendicitis.
There was a fair sampling of the various possibilities in the ER yesterday. Fortunately, the new ER has actual rooms with doors. Back in the day, you and the patient next to you were separated only by a rather flimsy curtain. I remember my mother lying there listening to an angry prisoner…emoting… on the other side of one of those curtains.
But that was then. This is now.
After seeing our younger daughter off into the capable hands of surgeon Agostino Cervone, we went downstairs to the surgical waiting area of the lobby. Soon after we settled in, the hospital foundation staff began transforming the lobby into a reception area for a party they were throwing for the volunteers who’ve been producing the annual garden festival for 20 years. They set up a bar and tall-boy tables draped in pink and adorned with floral arrangements.
There we sat at 4 p.m., all bedraggled and grubby — in our defense, we’d been at the hospital since 2 a.m. — waiting to hear from the surgeon removing one of our daughter’s organs. Lots of people came over to say hello. I worked at PBMC for a year from July 2009 to July 2010 in a career misstep that taught me many valuable lessons. And all I could think about (besides my daughter on an operating table upstairs) was “Oh my God, I never brushed my teeth or my hair today.”
When we heard from Dr. Cervone that the procedure was done and all was well, we reunited with our child in her room on the first floor — in the wing adjacent to the garden festival party. After a time, my husband went home. I stayed behind with my second-born child.
I was sitting in a chair facing the bed, back to the window, in a room fronting Roanoke Avenue. A sudden, loud burst from the P.A. system blared, “ATTENTION! ATTENTION! CODE SILVER! CODE SILVER! CODE SILVER!”
I know some hospital alert codes after my year of employment there, but “code silver” was new to me.
A woman in scrubs opened the door to my daughter’s room. “OK your shades are drawn. Stay in the room,’ she directed, then left, closing the door behind her.
My daughter and I looked at each other, puzzled.
I texted my husband, who was at home.
“Are you listening to the scanner? Is anything going on?”
Before he could answer, another woman in scrubs opened the door. “OK your shades are drawn.” She closed the door again quickly.
There was a lot of activity and many voices in the hallway.
“I guess I should move my chair away from the window,” I said to my daughter. I did. Then I did what I couldn’t resist. I looked outside. Sure enough, I saw two Riverhead Police SUVs.
By the time Peter texted back that he wasn’t hearing anything of interest, Courtney had Googled “hospital codes silver.”
“It means active shooter or hostage situation,” Courtney told me.
What?
Just then, another person opened the door.
“Just making sure your shades are drawn,” the young woman said, quickly closing the door behind her.
I got up and moved away from the window. As I did, I texted the hospital CEO, Andy Mitchell.
“What’s going on here? Code Silver? Active shooter? Hostage situation?”
My husband, meanwhile, was calling police headquarters.
He soon texted me: “A man with a shotgun, threatening to shoot a doctor and himself.”
“Oh, great,” I texted back.
Then Andy called me.
“So the windows aren’t bullet-proof glass?” I asked when I answered my phone.
Andy was out of state and said he’d gotten a “code silver” text. He didn’t know what it was, either, he said, and had to call the hospital to find out what was going on.
There’d been a threat, he explained. Someone who said he had a gun and was going to PBMC to shoot a doctor. The man was not in the building, Andy said.
About 10 minutes later, the loudspeaker blared again: “ALL CLEAR CODE SILVER! ALL CLEAR CODE SILVER! ALL CLEAR CODE SILVER!”
We could get back to our regularly scheduled recuperation activities. All was well with the world.
Today I learned from Riverhead Police that the matter remains under investigation. The threat might have even been made a whole day or two before last night’s incident.
“We’re trying to ascertain what prompted the call from PBMC security last night,” an officer told me. “The threat was apparently made to Southampton [police] two days ago.”
All’s well that ends well, I suppose. Though the folks attending the garden festival cocktail party certainly got a bit more than they bargained for. Let’s just call it a very memorable occasion.
Not unlike my daughter’s appendectomy.
Hey, if your kid needs to have an emergency appendectomy and you happen to be in the news business, experiencing — from the inside — a hospital lockdown in an active shooter situation is probably as good as it gets.
That and a great outcome for the surgery, of course. When you have a kid in a situation like that nothing else — not even breaking news when you’re a news website publisher— matters.
Nothing even comes close.
Denise Civiletti is an owner of East End Local Media Corp., publishers of RiverheadLOCAL.com and SoutholdLOCAL.com. An award-winning reporter, she is an attorney and former Riverhead Town councilwoman (1988-1991); she lives in Riverhead with her husband and business partner, Peter Blasl and their two college-student daughters. The views expressed in her blog are hers alone.
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