LAS VEGAS (FOX5) — As the Las Vegas valley reflects on the ninth anniversary of One October, FOX5 hears the account of a first responder who was at the Route 91 Festival and made a very critical phone call: hundreds of patients were on their way to Sunrise Hospital, and staff needed to brace themselves for the influx.
“This hospital means a lot to me, not just because of who they are, but because of what they did that night,” said Tracy Szymanski, director of Patient Transport and Support Services.
She’s in charge of the staff that takes in and moves patients in and around the hospital.
The avid country music fan attended the festival with her family every year. She was in the crowd when shots rang out.
After she and her husband fled from gunfire and hid, Szymanski made her first phone call to Sunrise Hospital.
“I picked up the phone, and I called the operators: ‘I’m at the festival. If I’ve heard one shot, I’ve heard hundreds. We’re going to get hit hard.’ I hung up, kept running,” Szymanski said.
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An on-call staff member scooped her up in the South Strip area and took her straight to Sunrise Hospital, where she went straight to work in her concert clothes.
Staff had prepared ahead for the patients arriving in droves in ambulances, personal vehicles, and pickup trucks; 125 patients had gunshot wounds.
Hundreds more concertgoers and family members kept calling or showing up at the hospital to search for loved ones, many of whom had cell phones and IDs in concert lockers at the festival site.
Szymanski led efforts to bring everyone into an auditorium; staff provided food, coffee, water, charging stations and donations of clothes for families who waited days or even weeks for patients to recover.
Victims and their family members knew her as “Nancy” in the years since One October, folks still visit her and call her.
“I have a couple people- I call them my Cali kids. They call me their Vegas mama,” she said.
She wears an angel bracelet made by the wife of one of the shooting victims.
“I always think of her. Through this horrible tragedy, I truly have a family,” Symanski said.
Every day, Sunrise workers enter and exit through a hallway full of Vegas Strong posters, signed by people from across the world who sent well wishes to all the first responders.
“It reminds me that it takes a village to care for a patient and that we’re one team for one patient, regardless of the title on our badge,” she said.
On One October, Symanski makes sure to attend the sunrise remembrance ceremony every year, but then spends the day where she knows she’s making a difference: at work at Sunrise Hospital.
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