Miracle kid giving back
Published: October 16, 2006
Tim Cahill can recall the hamburger he never got to eat with his father on that sunny afternoon a month ago. He even remembers telling the paramedics to “Keep talking to me!”
But he has no memory of his sister, Courtney, asking Dr. Suresh Agarwal, a major trauma surgeon at Boston Medical Center, “Is my brother going to die?”
It’s probably just as well that Tim Cahill never heard the doctor’s reply: “It’s a coin toss,” Agarwal told her, “and the coin is still in the air.”
When he rolled up to the ER on the afternoon of Sept. 11, Tim Cahill had no pulse and no blood pressure. It would take more than 30 pints of blood - almost five times his normal capacity - to keep Tim breathing in those first few hours.
A thug who had mistaken this 25-year-old youth worker from the South Boston Neighborhood House for another thug, plunged a knife into Cahill’s gut. After it ripped through his liver, it cut the inferior vena cava, the major vein leading to the heart.
“It’s a catastrophic wound,” said Tim’s mother, Maureen, who works as a surgical nurse in the ambulatory center at BMC. “Most times you bleed out with a cut like that. And if Timmy had been anywhere else, he wouldn’t be here right now.”
Last night, she looked across the kitchen counter at her gaunt but smiling son. In the landscape of her smile was the gratitude for what she called the “threads of miracles” that came together to save her son.
“On that particular afternoon, three out of the four major trauma surgeons were all on duty,” she said. “After Timmy was stabbed, the guys in the bar, Freddy Finn and John Nee, who are both firefighters and paramedics, did exactly the right thing. They applied the proper pressure, elevated his legs to send blood toward his heart.
“It was just a miracle they happened to be there, or Timmy wouldn’t be here.”
During the week he teetered on the brink of death, lying in the ICU under the protective custody of the BPD, doctors had to keep Tim Cahill’s torso open from the top of his sternum clear down to his groin. Though it took some 25 staples to close his chest, part of his abdomen remains unstitched, bound by pressure bandages.
After the endless supply of food, flowers, cards and prayer medals, those teens who conducted a vigil at BMC for their mentor asked what else they could do.
“That’s when we thought that a blood drive might be a great a idea,” Maureen Cahill said.
Tim smiled from underneath his baseball cap and softly said, “I needed some way to give back the blood I stole,” he chuckled, “or like my nurse, Patty Harrison put it, ‘The blood I borrowed.’ ”
So, this afternoon, as a way of thanking the community that surrounded him in such life and guided him home on a sea of prayers, Tim Cahill will be at the South Boston Neighborhood House’s Doc and Mary Tynan Senior Center at 136 H Street, at the corner of H and E Sixth streets, to preside over a blood drive.
“I want to be able to thank all the people for everything they’ve done for me and for my family,” this modest young man said. “Going through something like this, you come to appreciate what really matters, your family and friends and the community you live in. How do I begin to thank everyone for their prayers and their love?”
Tim Cahill was told he’s already done it. Living, smiling, being able to coach a hockey team of tiny skaters, returning to mentor the teens who need his quiet leadership is the real thanks. He smiled and shrugged.
After he emerged from his induced coma, after his large and loving family surrounded his bed in joyful conversation, the weary brother with a tube down his throat looked at his sister Courtney, grabbed a pencil and scribbled a request:
“I love you all, now please shut up.”
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