Miracle medic Steve Rashford’s kindest lie: I won’t let you die
This is the untold story of Queensland’s most skilled medical first responder and his days of life and death, including the harrowing scene of Hannah Clarke’s murder where he had to try to save her, and her killer.
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THE man in front of them was blackened by fire – so black they couldn’t tell how badly he’d been burned.
A knife had been stabbed into his abdomen, just below the sternum, thrust upward until it pierced his heart.
He was unconscious by then, but minutes earlier he had stood by a flaming car, brandishing that same knife, stopping people from helping the children inside.
Hannah Clarke was 100m away.
Teams of emergency responders ran between her and the person who had inflicted his evil on a mother and her three precious babies.
Queensland’s most qualified emergency medical responder, Stephen Rashford, had been called to work in with the High Acuity Response Unit crew and other paramedics on scene.
A job requiring HARU and Dr Rashford – the Queensland Ambulance Service medical director – meant someone was in dire need of help.
It meant they would be receiving care from the ambulance service’s most highly qualified emergency medics – the people you wanted to see, and yet, never want to see.
Dr Rashford would spend his time running back and forth, back and forth, between a dying man who had committed mass murder and a dying woman who had just seen her children killed. He ran, advising and assisting skilled paramedics on the scene.
In the background, still smouldering, was the car. A tarp covered the children inside.
Dr Rashford was gentle and kind with Hannah.
Sometimes, outside of a hospital, it can be difficult to tell how badly someone has been burnt.
Burns can be deceptive.
But Hannah’s burns were easy to read. He knew she would not survive them.
“I’m going to look after your pain,” he told her.
And then the kindest lie he could tell: “I’m not going to let you die.”
He ran back. And then back again. And then, an urgent shout: “Hey doc! You’ve got to come down the other end!”
The man who had done that to her was in cardiac arrest. Burnt and blackened, a knife in his chest.
They would try to save him, despite the horror of it, despite the raw, human emotion of it.
“I know what he’s done,” Dr Rashford said.
“I just don’t want to treat him at all but you’ve got to be professional. I don’t want anyone saying he didn’t receive treatment.”
And so Queensland’s most highly skilled emergency responder cut open Rowan Baxter’s chest and tried to save his life.
*SCROLL DOWN TO READ MORE ABOUT DR RASHFORD’S INVOLVEMENT IN THE HANNAH CLARKE CASE*
BATTLEFIELD: BRISBANE
ON THE battlefields of Afghanistan, there are doctors performing emergency procedures on people with catastrophic injuries inside moving helicopters – lights off, doors open.
It is the worst environment imaginable in which to treat a patient.
And so, over the years, war zone medics have developed incredible techniques to keep people alive outside of a hospital.
There is a doctor in Queensland doing the same thing – borrowing battlefield expertise to save lives on the streets of Brisbane.
Stephen Rashford has worked in hospital emergency rooms, as a helicopter retrieval doctor, on the streets of London and even spent years wrangling lifesaving medical help for Australians caught in international catastrophes.
In Brisbane, he is so valuable his car is tracked in real time to make it easier for him to be deployed.
“These things Steve does as an emergency physician are incredibly rare,” says Daryl Wall, a world-renowned trauma surgeon who has worked with Dr Rashford for decades.
“He carries out a very fast assessment of patients using ultrasound, he canulates veins faster than blinking, he intubates a patient while talking to them because he can see they are just about to die.
“He has very sophisticated resuscitation techniques.
“The research out of Afghanistan is to use very little saline and to use blood early – he’s engineered for QAS to have access to blood very quickly.
“These are battlefield skills he uses on the streets of Brisbane.”
Dr Rashford, he says, will amputate a limb, cut into the chest wall, cut through to the heart or cut into the airway to overcome a blockage.
“A lot of these techniques he brings – you can do these things if the patient is going to die and there’s nothing else to be done,” Dr Wall said.
“He and the QAS have moved the care of the patient to the site of the crash.
“They’ve moved intensive care into that zone.
“There is so much they can do, right there and then.”
Dr Rashford combines, Dr Wall says, incredible skill and mental agility with absolute humanity.
There’s footage taken from Dr Rashford’s GoPro camera that is used as a training tool.
Dr Wall describes it as “beautiful”, as incredibly human.
A man is being cared for by a HARU crew in the back of an ambulance.
He has shot himself in the heart with a staple gun by accident.
He’s nearly dead, struggling to breathe.
“ (Dr Rashford) goes up and holds the patient’s hand,” Dr Wall says.
“He says to him, ‘open your mouth’, and in that moment he sticks down the tracheal tube.
“The smoothness of it. Incredible. And the patient is whisked off to hospital.”
There’s a plane crash Dr Wall has read about – a 727 hit by a smaller plane. Many years ago over Los Angeles.
After determining there was nothing they could do to save themselves, the pilots spent their last three minutes alive speaking about what had happened for the plane’s flight recorder.
They did it calmly, Dr Wall said, without emotion, in the hope that it would help others.
“They carried out everything they could do to the highest standard in their last minutes alive,” he said.
“That’s Steve. He has these extraordinary, deeply human but fierce qualities.
“He’s the ultimate professional.”
MAN WHO’S ALWAYS ON CALL
A DAY in the life of Dr Stephen Rashford is a series of innocuous occurrences catapulting into the extreme.
A drive to the Fortitude Valley homemaker centre with his wife becomes a dash into the city where a man wielding a knife has stabbed a tourist and been shot by police.
Christmas lunch with his mother is cut short by a horror car crash that kills a mother and daughter.
A man on fire is shot by police.
A vicious brawl in a Zillmere park leaves a young man dead.
Former Wallaby Toutai Kefu and his family are attacked by machete and axe-wielding youths in their Brisbane home. There’s so much blood when Dr Rashford arrives, they all slip and slide in it. Later, a journalist asks him if it’s the worst thing he’s seen. It’s not even close.
A new mother is swooped by a magpie and trips with her baby girl, Mia. It’s the only case where he’s ever sent a condolence card.
“I found it so distressing … they were such a beautiful family,” he said.
A man up a tree with a chainsaw slips and falls, the rope he is attached to hanging him by the neck.
That one interrupted dinner with friends.
Dr Rashford climbed on to a shed and held him by the legs until another crew arrived to help.
Stabbings, shootings, heart failure, drownings, car crashes.
He sees it all, sees it all the time.
It’s why he never leaves home after an angry word.
You just never know.
‘I HAD THE BRAIN FOR IT’
AS A boy, Stephen Rashford dreamed of being a pilot.
His father would collect him from school each week and drive him to the airport for a flying lesson.
Later, he would go to an air force lecture and leave with the impression he was not smart enough to chase that dream. He studied medicine instead, graduating from the University of Queensland in 1990.
For a few years, he did country relieving, working as a GP in places such as Cherbourg, Wondai, Emerald and Goondiwindi. He dreamed of being the local doctor on Hamilton Island, where he would waltz about in resort wear, while locals drinking cocktails called out: “Hi doc!”
Instead, he got the gritty work of the isolated outback.
It would shape him – the complex and frightening medical emergencies he saw out in the bush were sometimes too much for a young doctor. And help was far away.
“I had premature breech deliveries. People who were very sick with meningitis,” he said. “We had a retrieval for someone who had very severe meningitis … it was beyond my level of care I could provide as a junior doctor. I could give them antibiotics and the like, but they needed mechanical ventilation. A wonderful retrieval doctor came out with the retrieval nurse and they saved my bacon and I thought, hmm, that wouldn’t be a bad job.”
He worked in emergency medicine after that. He spent some time at the Princess Alexandra’s emergency department, then combined his dream of flying with his career in medicine.
He flew out of Brisbane, part of a rescue helicopter team. He flew out of Sydney, worked on a head injury retrieval trial, flew in London.
He took on specialist roles at hospitals and set up a centralised aeromedical service for South East Queensland. He never forgot what it was like to be a bush doctor in need of a team of specialists to save your bacon.
In his “spare time”, Dr Rashford worked as a medical director for a company that underwrites travel insurance. When Australians or New Zealanders found themselves in trouble overseas, he worked out how to get them the best medical treatment.
“I can tell you about crocodile attacks in the Solomons, I can get you an MRI in Peru probably faster than I can get you one in Brisbane, (I’ve handled) crazy scenarios, terrorist attacks … we flew a plane into Kathmandu when they had the earthquake. They were really good to me and I had the brain for it.”
In 2005, he began work as the QAS medical director.
He now works alongside the service’s clinical director – former emergency nurse turned critical care paramedic Lachlan Parker.
Back when they started, on-road paramedics had six or seven drugs in their repertoire. Now they have 50.
Together, they come up with new treatments, new techniques and new training procedures that allow paramedics to save more lives.
“It sounds cliched, but our theory is, if we can get the protocols right, then we can help multiple patients a day,” Parker says.
”I help Steve with some crazy ideas to bring things into the service.”
Together they have revolutionised that “golden hour” – the hour emergency responders say you have to get to hospital to maximise your chance of survival. Now, they can bring the hospital to you.
YOU’D BETTER GO, STEVE
February 19, 2020. It’s early morning. Stephen Rashford is in a meeting when his phone rings.
“Hey listen, there’s a job we wouldn’t mind you going to,” someone from the operations centre says.
The High Acuity Response Unit is already on its way, the caller says.
And HARU has asked for Dr Rashford.
HARU placements are highly competitive.
Only experienced critical care paramedics can apply.
The last round of interviews had 70 applications from very skilled people vying for eight spots.
A HARU crew will often encompass an emergency doctor on secondment from a hospital. A highly qualified HARU crew asking for Dr Rashford was a bad sign.
“Currently what we know is that there are three kids in a car on fire and there’s someone with a knife stopping anyone helping,” the caller said.
Dr Rashford repeated the information to then-QAS commissioner Russell Bowles.
“You’d better go,” the commissioner said.
SUBURBIAHORROR
IT was a 12-minute drive from Kedron to Camp Hill, to a crime scene so horrific it would change the conversation around domestic violence on a nationwide scale.
“It’s a beautiful suburban street. Beautiful homes,” Dr Rashford said.
A car, still smouldering, was covered with a tarp.
At one end was Hannah Clarke. A beautiful mother who, with her three young children – Aaliyah, 6, Laianah, 4, and Trey, 3 – had escaped a terrible relationship.
The children had been strapped into their car seats when Hannah set off from her parents’ home for the morning school run.
She had been terrified of her ex-husband.
“Mum, what happens to my babies when he kills me?” she had asked her parents.
Rowan Baxter had ambushed her as she pulled out of the driveway. He had jumped into the passenger seat, wielding a knife. He told her to drive. Then he had poured petrol over them all.
She had not been able to save her babies.
Bystanders who tried to put out the flames were forced back by a raging Baxter.
And then, when it was too late for any of them, he plunged his knife into his abdomen, angled up so he had hit his own heart.
TELLING THE KINDEST LIE
DR Rashford remembers the day well.
“You had Hannah at one end and you had the perpetrator at the other end,” he said.
“(The scene) was about 100m long.
“Mark Disney, the HARU paramedic, was down with the perpetrator, who had stuck the knife into his epigastrium (his upper abdomen below the sternum).
“And he was dark and sometimes when people are dark it’s hard to work out how burnt they are.
“I know that sounds … but it can be really difficult.
“Whereas, looking at Hannah, she was obviously burnt.
“Everything but the soles of her feet.”
It was a terrible scene. Hannah was awake and talking.
They had her on a stretcher where firefighters were cooling her with water; carefully, gently.
“When you have a magnitude of burn as bad as hers, she was one of those people you look at and you think, I don’t think you can survive this,” Dr Rashford said.
To the paramedics on scene, he said: “She’s going to swell. You’re going to have to anaesthetise her.”
A bad burn will obstruct the airway. Burns cause swelling.
Tissues get tight and airways close.
He gave them instructions, then ran back to Mark.
“Mark was there, I saw the knife in situ,” he said.
“I said right, he’s still got vital signs?
“Yeah, he had vital signs, he’s got the burns.
“Well, set up to anaesthetise him. How about you do the anaesthetic?
“We talked about doses and I said, well, seeya later, I’m going back up the other end.”
Another sprint along that suburban street.
He stood next to Hannah. He spoke to her.
“I told her what we were doing, tried to reassure her and comfort her as best I could, as all the paramedics were,” he said.
“I said, ‘It’s OK, we’re going to look after you, we’re going to look after your pain’.”
Then he said: “I’m not going to let you die.”
It is something he sometimes tells his dying patients.
I won’t let you die. You’re not going to die.
He does not know if it is the right thing to do. But it is the human thing to do. In those final moments of consciousness, when there is nothing else he can do, he will take their hand and lie.
THE RAW HUMAN EMOTION
DOWN the street, Mark was setting up to treat Baxter when the man went into cardiac arrest.
He sent a firefighter to run for Dr Rashford.
“There’s a raw human emotion,” he said.
“I know what he’s done. I just don’t want to treat him at all but you’ve got to be professional.
“But then I don’t want to be overly cavalier.
“I don’t want anyone saying he didn’t receive treatment.
“So I pulled the knife out of his abdomen and sort of threw it to the side and did a thoracotomy.”
Dr Rashford sliced open burned flesh and opened Baxter’s chest like a clam – right there in the street.
But Baxter would not become a story of survival.
Instead, he joined the great majority of people who would not live through stabbing himself in the heart.
Dr Rashford returned to Hannah.
“And subsequently,” he said, “she had non-survivable injuries.
“It’s just a terrible thing.”
ATTACKED BY A MADMAN
SIMONE O’Brien’s Brisbane home was a chaos of blood and police, of stunned neighbours and frightened children.
Dr Rashford found her down a hallway, her face and skull caved in from dozens of blows from a madman with a baseball bat.
“I didn’t know it was domestic violence,” he said.
“I knew it was an act of violence. I remember knowing we had a person who was semiconscious who had been attacked in the head with a baseball bat.
“All I remember is that there were lots of neighbours, lots of police.
“She had been just horrendously attacked.
“She had horrendous facial injuries – and obviously I suspected a brain injury.
“She had a swollen, bloody, contused, deformed face.
“As bad as I’d seen for someone who’d been attacked.”
Simone met Glenn Cable online. He said he was a real estate agent. Never married. No children.
She was a proud single mother with three beautiful kids. They had been together for nine months when she decided to call it off.
Today, in her new life as a domestic violence survivor and speaker, she knows all about coercive control, about red flags.
He would send flowers too often – every day.
Money was going missing, contacts disappeared from her phone.
He proposed in front of her children so she would not be able to say no.
She had not wanted to break up with him in front of her kids – so she did it via text while she was at work.
That night, he arrived at her house.
He had wanted to talk. They went into her bedroom and closed the door.
Later, they would realise Cable had planted the baseball bat in her room on an earlier visit.
He had worked out she was planning to break things off.
“I can remember him saying, ‘why can’t we be in a relationship?’ ” Simone said.
She had tried to explain.
He had knocked her to the ground. Or she had fallen. She is not sure which.
“I was on the ground and I looked up and I saw the bat coming down on me,” Simone said.
He hit her somewhere between 45 and 50 times. The first swings broke her arm when she brought it up to fend him off.
“You know what? I thought I was going to die,” she said.
“I tried to get up on that arm but it was broken, it bent again.”
Her daughters ran outside. They screamed to the neighbours, dialled triple-0.
Simone’s neighbours came running. She will never stop feeling grateful for what they did.
Two men from the Samoan family next door burst into the house.
They dragged Cable from her, dragged him out to the front garden. He got a knee in the back, his face pushed into the ground.
Her other neighbours came running too.
The wife worked in pathology. Still in her whites from work, she did what she could to keep Simone alive until paramedics arrived.
“You just get into a mode. You hear of elite sports people, they don’t hear the crowds, it’s the same with this,” Dr Rashford said.
He and the two critical care paramedics sedated Simone and then, in the back of the ambulance, she was rapidly anaesthetised.
“Normally what happens is, when you suffer a major head injury, you’ve only got a certain amount of space in there,” he said.
“It’s filled with brain, fluid which bathes your brain, the blood in your brain … and then not much else.
“So what happens is, your brain starts to swell – or you get extra bleeding and it puts pressure on your brain.
“And I think what happened is, because her bones were so badly broken, it didn’t put any pressure on her brain.
“So she survived cognitively intact but had obviously horrific bone injuries and has had so much surgery. She’s an incredibly brave woman.”
‘SO MANY CAN’T BE SAVED’
SO many people saved Simone’s life.
Her daughters saved her life when they called for help.
Her neighbours saved her life when they dragged her attacker away, when they gave her the best first aid they could.
The critical care paramedics – confronted with some of the most horrific injuries they’d ever see – saved her life.
But Simone knows what it meant to have Dr Rashford with her that night.
“Dr Rashford is my hero. He saved me,” she said.
Her recovery has been long – 52 surgeries. She lost an eye. She doesn’t look the same. People look at her curiously, trying to work out what might have happened to her. She has had to learn to love herself again.
A long time into her recovery, she got to meet Dr Rashford.
“He’s been able to answer a lot of questions for me,” Simone said.
Dr Rashford finds it difficult to meet the patients he saves.
It can never be as personal for him as it is for them.
He sees having talent and skill in one field no more impressive than any other.
He admires the people who design buildings, the people who construct them – all the things he cannot do.
He admires the young paramedics who call him for advice. The ones who call him at 2am to ask him about a strange reading on an ECG.
The ones who say excitedly: “Thanks doc! I’ll go read up on this!”
He admires the young paramedic who was there helping when he cut open Matt’s chest in the hallway of the Hamilton apartment block.
She said to him after: “I think I just like looking after the oldies.”
He hopes someone like her looks after him when he is old.
“This week alone I’ve been to the guy who fell 15 floors. I went to a motorcyclist who died,” Dr Rashford said. He took a call from paramedics needing help to save a baby. The baby died.
So many can’t be saved. It is hard to celebrate the ones who live.
“I think it’s a protection thing,” he said. “We see some very sad things but we see lots of happy things as well. I think it’s the best job in the world.”
Originally published as Miracle medic Steve Rashford’s kindest lie: I won’t let you die
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