A nurse who treated her own woulds after realising she was going to bleed out and die during the Las Vegas massacre has opened up on her horror.
Talking from her hospital bed in Las Vegas Natalie Vanderstay, 43, recalled the horror of Sunday night when Stephen Paddock took more than 20 assault rifles up to the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel and sprayed thousands of bullets at those attending the Route 91 festival below.
She is convinced her name would have been added to the death toll, which currently stands at 58, had it not been for the people who helped her get to hospital.
The nurse recalled being trampled and shot and then summoning a survival instinct to find a way out.
She said she was forced to clamber over people to save herself, which is something that may haunt her forever.
Natalie Vanderstay answers questions from her hospital bed at University Medical Center on Tuesday. Vanderstay was shot in the stomach, and suffered a leg injury when Stephen Paddock opened fire
Talking from her hospital bed with Natalie Vanderstay, 43, recalled the horror of Sunday night when Sa gunman took more than 20 assault rifles up to the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel and sprayed thousands of bullets at those attending the Route 91 festival below
Vanderstay was shot in the stomach – something she said felt like a baseball bat to the gut.
‘People were screaming. And the screams got louder and louder,’ she said.
‘I felt this force in my stomach and I knew that I had gotten shot.’
When the gunfire ripped into her, ‘it felt like a huge baseball, just the force of it going through my stomach.’
Shrapnel had also shredded her leg, but with her expert knowledge, she knew she had to act fast to survive, taking off her flannel shirt to tightly wrap the leg.
‘I said, “OK, I can’t stay here. I’m going to bleed out.” It hurt so bad,’ Vanderstay said, weeping from her bed at University Medical Center on Tuesday.
‘But I knew I didn’t want to die. I wasn’t ready to die.’
‘There were people that were dead. There was a guy, his eye was blown out, and I couldn’t help him,’ she said.
At the site of the attack, people fashioned stretchers out of fence posts and tarps and made tourniquets out of belts.
To get out alive, Vanderstay willed herself to jump over a fence and escape the concert ground.
She then hunkered down with a group of strangers, waiting for the seemingly endless gunfire to stop.
Once bullets stopped raining down from overhead, Vanderstay spotted a cab with three people already inside.
She told them she’d been shot and needed to get to a hospital.
The strangers took her in and put pressure on her stomach wound, and the quick-thinking cab driver knew not to take her to the nearest hospital but to University Medical Center, the only Level I trauma center in the state.
‘If it wasn’t for that cab driver, I wouldn’t be here,’ she said, breaking down.
‘And I don’t know who he is. He did everything to get me here.’
For those wounded by bullets, their prognoses depend heavily on where exactly the bullets struck.
Vanderstay said she woke up feeling immense gratitude, for all the strangers and good Samaritans who helped her stay alive and for all the nurses and doctors at the hospital who saved her life.
‘I just remember waking up and my friends were there saying, “You made it. You’re OK,” Vanderstay said.
The next step is healing. ‘The road to recovery is going to be tough, mentally and physically.’
Vanderstay was shot in the stomach – something she said felt like a baseball bat to the gut
The staggering count of people injured in the shooting at a Las Vegas music festival on Sunday means their recoveries are likely to be as varied as the victims themselves.
Some injuries are as simple as broken bones, while others are gunshot wounds involving multiple surgeries and potential transplants.
All come with the added emotional scars of enduring the deadliest shooting in modern US history, with 58 killed.
Vanderstay is one of more than 500 people injured that night.
At least 130 people remained hospitalized Tuesday, with 48 listed in critical condition.
At Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center alone, the count of those treated included 120 people who were struck by gunfire, a glimpse of the amount of ammunition unleashed in the attack.
Rehabilitation for the most seriously hurt victims will take far longer than many may realize.
Dr Thomas Scalea, physician-in-chief at the University of Maryland’s Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, one of the nation’s largest trauma centers predicted it would be years until some survivors recover.
Vanderstay is one of more than 500 people injured that night. At least 130 people remained hospitalized Tuesday, with 48 listed in critical condition
Mike Kordich, a firefighter from Rancho Cucamonga, California, answers questions from his hospital bed at Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas. Kordich was giving a severely injured person CPR when he was hit by a bullet
For Vanderstay, there are physical wounds that she as a nurse knows will take many weeks or longer to heal.
She underwent surgery to have her colon and small intestine resectioned, meaning portions were removed.
Then there are the memories of how it happened and how one night out with friends at a concert turned into a siege.