Hostage

Bang! Bang! Bang! It sounded like someone hitting a tea tray on a table, until I remembered that I was on the wrong side of the Atlantic for consultants to be served with tea and biscuits and screaming voices made me realise that the sounds were gunshots. My fellowship training in paediatric neurology entailed seeing some adult patients, and I had been called to consult in the emergency room at University of Southern California Medical Center, the largest acute care hospital in the United States, at midday on 8 February 1993. “Get out! He's shooting doctors!” someone yelled. Then a man's voice: “I don't want nurses, I want doctors! I want white coats.” The patient and I crouched on the floor. I was dressed in scrubs—white coats upset my paediatric patients—and I threw my ID badge under the examination couch.

Footsteps approached and the cubicle curtain was swept back to reveal a gun pointed at me by a tall, stocky man in combat gear with his other arm round the neck of a female file clerk. “You're a doctor, aren't you?” he shouted. I told him that I was a nurse. “Don't give me that. You're a doctor.” I waited for the bullet. Then, “You're British. I like British. I like ‘Are you being served.’”