Rolando Baez was doing what he'd done since he was a young boy in Cuba -- he was climbing the tallest tree he could find. And compared to the towering coconut palms he'd clambered up in his native country, the squat Australian Christmas tree at the BART station at 16th and Mission was anything but a challenge.
The 34-year-old Baez has scaled trees from one side of this continent to the other. But as he ascended the tree at 4:30 a.m. on the morning of Aug. 3, Baez experienced a climbing first.
The branch snapped.
The next thing Baez knew, he was wedged tightly atop the wrought-iron fence that surrounds the BART station. Attribute it to the sudden stop of a 12-foot fall, or a buzz from the bottle he'd nipped on that morning, but Baez didn't realize the seriousness of his tumble until he tried to pull himself off the fence. A few homeless men tried to help him to no avail. The next thing Baez knew, paramedic Martha Cody-Berry was explaining to him that he was not caught between the bars as he thought. He was skewered.
Two of the fence's blunt bars had pierced the back of Baez's upper thighs and punched through his groin. Had he landed an inch either way, the spikes would have struck a femoral artery, the main blood line to the leg, and he would have instantly bled to death.
Baez, a homeless man and itinerant, has been shot in the back six times. He's taken another bullet in the neck. He's been stabbed eight times and boasts the long, tissuey scars to prove it. He has known pain, but nothing like the pain of a one-in-a-million accident like this.
"When we got the call, we just thought that they were bullshitting us," says Cody-Berry, who was the first paramedic on the scene. "I mean come on, they say a man is at 16th and Mission and he's impaled himself on a fence. I've seen a lot of things in my 10 years as a paramedic, but I'd never heard of anything like that."
When Cody-Berry got to the corner of the fence next to the Wells-Fargo Bank, she and her partner, Susan Cody-Berry (who is also her life partner), thought the man slumped over the bars was dead. There was blood everywhere, and they couldn't raise a radial pulse, which is located on the lower forearm near the wrist. Then, as the two paramedics cut away his clothing to get a better look at the injuries, Baez stirred. Immediately, they gave him a saline IV to replace blood and started checking for vital signs. Another team of paramedics, Russ Zimmerman and Mike Rambo, rolled in to the scene, hooked up more saline IVs, fitted Baez with a cervical collar to stabilize his neck, and began administering oxygen.
Martha Cody-Berry propped herself up on the fence to pump saline and settle Baez, who would wake every few minutes and struggle; he only vaguely remembers the scene since he tried to sleep to escape the pain.
Baez says he knew the assembled paramedics, police officers, and firefighters on the scene were there to free him, but at one point he was unsure he wanted them to succeed.
" 'Shoot me in the head,' I said, 'Why do you want to see a man suffer like this?' "
Cody-Berry answered his demands with assurances that they would release him from the fence if he just relaxed. But since fence impalings aren't part of rescue fundamentals, the firefighters and paramedics were stumped.
"Fire wanted to yank him off the fence," says Cody-Berry. The paramedic teams warned that, like any stabbing, removing the bars could cause more tissue damage and blood loss. San Francisco Fire Department Battalion Chief Hank Smith led the joint decision to haul both Baez and the fence to San Francisco General Hospital.
The firefighters revved up their K-12 all-purpose saw and started on the bars, but according to Cody-Berry, the fence chewed off the metal blade and spat out the teeth. Smith, who has been with the department for 30 years, knew the metal saw was useless.
"The vibrations in human flesh would be excruciating," he says. "And the bars were thick, about an inch and a half by 3 inches. We had to do something; we couldn't just leave him up there."
Smith remembered a similar rescue in New York where a man had been impaled, and he moved to imitate that success: He ordered the firefighters to spark a gas torch.
The bars weren't melting, but as luck would have it, a welder with Muni happened to be on his way to work. The welder told the emergency team that their torch would not suffice but that he had the right equipment.
The welder's torch sliced the bars in seconds, and six firefighters and the four paramedics lifted the 3-by-5-foot section to the ground and then worked Baez onto a backboard on top of a gurney, placing a large trauma bag under the removed fence to keep it level.
Upon arriving at General Hospital, Baez was still conscious according to his surgeon, Dr. Stan Rogers.
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