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| Mother Liz Norden, with her two sons Paul and JP. |
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Agony of mother whose TWO sons each lost a leg as doctors say up to 10 had their limbs blown off
The Daily Mail
Tue April 16, 2013
Area: Boston (Manchester)
Two brothers both lost a leg in the Boston Marathon bombings and were among the 176 injured and up to 10 victims who had a limb torn off.
Liz Norden said one of her sons called her from his ambulance to say, 'Ma, I'm hurt real bad.'
Her sons, both roofers and graduates Stoneham High School, went to the race to watch one of their friends compete in Monday's race.
They were among the 176 injured, 17 of whom are still listed in critical condition Tuesday morning. As many as 10 had limbs amputated.
There were nine children, the youngest of whom is just 2-years-old, among the wounded. An 11-year-old boy had shrapnel tear into his leg.
Norden raced to the hospital and soon learned that her sons had each lost a leg from below the knee.
'I'd never imagined in my wildest dreams this would ever happen,' she told the Boston Globe as she struggled to compose herself, surrounded by family members.
'I have two sons in two different hospitals,' she told NBC News. 'I am just so heartbroken.'
Her sons were standing next to Martin Richard, 8, who was among the three killed.
Martin's six-year-old sister lost a leg.
Another of the gravely wounded is 11-year-old Aaron Hern, whose mother, Katherine, was competing in the race.
The boy, from Martinez, Calif., had been looking forward to the family trip to Boston.
Hewas standing on the street as his father was on the bleachers as they waited for her to finish.
'He was waiting for his mom to go through the finish line to take pictures of her and shortly before she got there, the bomb went off,' family friend Janene Sides said.
Shrapnel tore into his leg, seriously wounding the sixth grader whose 12th birthday is in a couple of weeks.
'Dad was up on the bleachers looking down and the crowd got chaotic and he found him lying down,' Sides told ABC News.
Emergency responders quickly applied a tourniquet. Aaron's father was separated from him and his parents did not immediately know which hospital their child had been rushed to.
Aaron is expected to stay in the hospital for one week.
Kevin Corcoran was with his wife and teenage daughter when the bombs went off. His wife, Celeste, lost both of her legs and his child was badly wounded, the New York Daily News said.
'Terrorism ripped apart our family,' his brother, Tim Corcoran, said at a vigil at the the hospital.
'He is an emotional mess,' Tim Corcoran said of his brother. 'His wife just lost both her legs. His daughter almost died.'
Csilla Schneider said her 24-year-old brother, who also lost his legs and became the subject of a gruesome photo that was shot as he was being led from the scene in a wheelchair.
'We were about 10 feet from the finish line. It was quite loud,' LeAnn told the Today show.
Nick said, 'People were on the ground. A lot of broken limbs - I think I saw a guy with no limbs at all.'
Nicole Gross, 31, was behind a fence with her husband, Michael, waiting for her mother to finish when the explosions detonated.
According to a family friend who did not want to be identified, Michael Gross posted on his private Facebook account that his wife, a personal trainer at a Charlotte Athletic Club, has compound leg fractures.
Doctors described treating injuries more commonly seen in the battlefield.
Some patients had up to 40 pieces of shrapnel inside of them.
'I've never obviously been in combat, but people I've trained with have been and this is as close as I can imagine it would be,' said Dr. Vivek Shah who had just finished competing in the race when the two bombs went off.
'Just, basically piles of victims. Everything I saw was a traumatic amputation, basically.'
Shah, an orthopedic surgeon at New England Baptist Hospital in Roxbury Crossing, Mass., said he saw injuries along the sidewalks on Boylston Street.
'In all my medical training, I have not seen things that I saw. Everything was traumatic,' Shah told ABC News.
At Massachusetts General Hospital, Alasdair Conn, chief of emergency services, said, 'This is something I've never seen in my 25 years here . . . this amount of carnage in the civilian population. This is what we expect from war.'
There are 29 patients at Massachusetts General, eight of whom are in critical condition.
Dr. Michael Epstein, who works in the emergency department at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said at least 24 victims were in their care.
The injuries ranged from eardrum damage to those with life-threatening injuries, with some suffering 'extensive damage', he added.
Brigham and Women's treated 31 patients, many of whom had orthopedic wounds. Five victims are still listed in critical condition as of Tuesday morning.
The youngest patients were taken to Boston Children's Hospital. Seven have been discharged with two remaining in critical condition.
There were also nine patients at Tufts Medical Center.
Witnesses have described how twin bomb blasts turned the 26th mile of the Boston Marathon into a war zone, littering the final stretch of the race with disembodied limbs, wounded runners who lost their legs, and a lone shoe with flesh still in it.
'There were people all over the ground,' said Roupen Bastajian, 35, a state trooper from Smithfield, RI, who had just finished the race.
'We started grabbing tourniquets and started tying legs,' he said, helping victims while still wrapped in his post-race heat blanket.
'In 28 years, this is definitely the worst I've seen,' Boston Fire Department District Chief Ron Harrington told NBC News.
'Bodies and body parts. Blood all over. A little boy lying in the street. A young woman in her twenties. Both dead. It was mayhem. I saw two people with arms hanging loose, and one without a leg.
The homemade explosives were believed to have been made using pressure cookers and metal ball bearings, designed to look like discarded trash and placed inside black dufflebags.
Initial tests showed no use of C-4 or other high-grade explosives, suggesting that the packages detonated in the attack were crude explosive devices, federal law enforcement officials said.
The two detonated explosives were packed with metal objects and placed low to the ground, which could explain why so many victims lost feet, calves and ankles in the horrific explosions.
Massachusetts General Hospital trauma surgeon George Velmahos said today that a variety of sharp metal fragments were extracted from victims, including pellets and nails.
'The experience has been overwhelming; ...we're suffering emotionally for what happened to the people of Boston and many others,' Velmahos said.
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