ST. LOUIS _ Dr. Laurie Punch plunged her gloved hands into Sidney Taylor's open chest in a hospital's operating room here, pushing on his heart to make it pump again after a bullet had torn through his flesh, collarbone and lung. His pulse had faded to nothing. She needed to get his heart beating.
She couldn't let the bullet win.
Bullets are Punch's enemy. They threaten everything the 44-year-old trauma surgeon cherishes: her patients' lives, her community, even her family. So, just as she recalled doing two years ago with Taylor, Punch has made it her life's mission to stem the bleeding and the damage bullets cause _ and excise them if she can.
In the operating rooms at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, Punch treats gunshot victims, removing bullets that studies show can poison bodies with lead and fuel depression. And in her violence-racked community, she teaches people how to use tourniquets to stop bleeding, creating a legion of helpers while building trust between doctors and community members.
Punch feels a calling to St. Louis, a place with the nation's highest murder rate among big cities, where at least a dozen children were shot to death this summer alone, including a 7-year-old boy playing in his backyard. Punch believes all she's learned has prepared her for now, when gun violence kills an average of 100 Americans a day and mass shootings are so common that two this summer struck less than 24 hours apart.
To her, the battle is personal, in more ways than one.
Besides being a surgeon, she's a multiracial single mom living in Ferguson, Mo., just over a mile from where Michael Brown Jr., a black teenager, was shot and killed by a white police officer five years ago.
She has a son the same age as the little boy killed in the backyard in August. And she said, "I hear the gunshots echoing through my 2-acre backyard all the time."
In September, Punch brought her message to Washington, D.C., testifying before the House Ways and Means Oversight subcommittee on gun violence. Wearing a jacket and tie, she faced lawmakers to share the story of Shannon Hibler.
The 23-year-old was brought to Punch's hospital last summer, shot seven times. While the nurses gave him blood, Punch said, she cut open his chest, trying to force life back into his body _ to no avail.
"I watched his wife sink, as the floodwaters of vulnerability and risk came into her eyes, thinking about the life of her and her child and how they would live without him," Punch told the assembled lawmakers. "I watched his father rage. And I heard his mother wail."
Punch placed the black-and-yellow, blood-splattered Adidas sneakers she'd worn the day of the shooting on the table before her in the hearing room.
"I can't wash these stains out," she told lawmakers.
The trauma surgeon was adamant: Violence is a true medical problem doctors must treat in both the operating room and the community. Until they do that, she said, violence victims will continue to be vectors who spread violence.
"The disease that bullets bring does not yet have a name," she told Congress that day. "It's like an infection, because it affects more than just the flesh it pierces. It infects the entire family, the entire community. Even our country."
But healing also can be contagious _ spreading among victims, families and the physicians themselves.
Punch, who regularly visits the neighborhoods where her patients live, attended an event last year for Saint Louis Story Stitchers, an artist and youth collective working to prevent gun violence. She remembers spotting a volunteer she knew _ Antwan Pope, who'd been shot some years earlier but had found renewed purpose helping young people.
Punch told Pope about Hibler's case, and learned Hibler was Pope's cousin. Hibler's dad was at the community event, too, and he handed Punch a lapel pin with his son's picture.
She wore it on her white coat for months.
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