As Rosemarie recovers from multiple surgeries to repair the wounds to her lungs, liver and spleen and awaits a final procedure to treat her damaged stomach, the family has watched in horror as other defenseless people have endured mass shootings. Again and again — at a Texas church, in a small California town, at a Florida high school — the same type of gun, the same type of bullets. Dozens have died, and many others have been left like Rosemarie.
Picturing those shattered lives, knowing how difficult it will be to pick up the pieces, has convinced many of the Melansons — some of them gun owners and supporters of gun rights — that something needs to be done about gun violence. Parkland, Fla., with all those students killed, was a grim exclamation point.
“People have no idea,” Steve says, stepping out of the hospital room to get a cup of coffee from the cafeteria. Steve’s job as a graffiti technician for the city provides the health insurance that has covered the vast majority of Rosemarie’s medical bills. “They don’t know what it looks like.”
When he returns to Rosemarie, she is sobbing. He tries to calm her by rubbing her back, but then she starts to vomit, again. This time she brings up blood. A nurse administers anti-nausea medication while Steve holds his wife, helpless.
This is what it means to survive.
The shooting
Rosemarie was one of the first people struck when a gunman armed with 23 weapons — many of them semiautomatic, military-style rifles — opened fire from a hotel room at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, across the street and 32 stories above the Las Vegas Strip.
Seeing Stephanie and her sister Paige screaming over their mother’s collapsed body, a retired Los Angeles firefighter, Don Matthews, crawled over. He persuaded the younger women to flee, then plugged Rosemarie’s wound until she could be loaded into a truck and rushed to Sunrise Medical Center.
That’s where the Melansons found her, 11 hours later. “She looked bad. Terrible bad,” Steve recalled. Rosemarie’s face was bruised and swollen, her abdomen still open from surgery.
The bullet hit her chest and traveled diagonally downward across her torso, piercing her diaphragm, liver, stomach, and other organs. Though the bullet was small, the speed at which it traveled meant it slammed into her with tremendous force, producing a shock wave that obliterated surrounding tissue.
“The bullets have a blast effect,” said Matthew Johnson, a trauma surgeon who operated on Rosemarie. Johnson said her injury severity score, a 54 out of 75, was among the highest of the dozens of patients he treated from the Las Vegas massacre.
Rosemarie underwent nine surgeries in the three weeks after the shooting, and she spent nearly two months on life support while her organs healed.
But the woman who emerged from heavy sedation in November was not the same sunny, self-possessed person around whom the whole family once revolved.
Survival
A debilitating nausea set in. She has vomited almost every day since, and for months, doctors could not explain why. In February, after a short-lived attempt to bring her home ended with Steve taking her to the emergency room in an ambulance, the condition was diagnosed: Rosemarie has gastroparesis, meaning her damaged stomach muscles cannot push food through her system. She will need yet another surgery to treat the condition as well as to remove her gallbladder, which is infected.
The doctors must wait for her old injuries to heal before they can operate. But recently, her stomach wound reopened and became infected — another setback. So Rosemarie must remain at a rehab facility, dependent on an intravenous nutrient solution for sustenance and a daily dose of Ativan to keep her crushing anxiety at bay.
She slumps in her hospital bed, not making eye contact with visitors, their presence making her uneasy. But she cries when people leave, dreading being left alone. Loud noises and bright lights distress her, so Rosemarie often has the door to her room closed and the blinds drawn. Even the tiny Christmas tree that Stephanie bought to celebrate Rosemarie’s favorite holiday was too much.
“I’m overwhelmed,” she told her daughter.
Steve has learned to recognize his wife’s shifting moods, the way her expression goes blank just before the anxiety sets in. “What are you thinking about?” he asks. “Why are you crying?”
“I don’t know,” she tells him. “I can’t explain it.”
He believes in those moments that she is dwelling on the shooting, which she remembers in vivid detail. One of the first questions Rosemarie asked after her breathing tube was removed was, “How many people were killed?”
Not knowing what else to tell her, Steve told the truth: 58
They both began to cry.
“But you’re not one of them,” he added. “You’re still here.”
