Article content continued

“It’s the ability to hopefully alleviate suffering and sometimes do things that are actually life saving, that’s where the real gratification exists,” he says.

Photo by Craig Robertson/Postmedia Network

One of the curious things about a bullet is just how mercurial the path it travels can be. Lawless has moments where he will marvel, standing over a patient and looking down, and not at his surgical handiwork, but at how a bullet can pass within a millimetre of the heart — and miss — an impossibly close brush marking the difference between a patient’s chance at life, and a near certain death.

“You start to think, ‘wow,’ if the patient had turned differently, or been slumped over, or if they were walking or running away, there are so many factors — and part of it is fate,” he says. “Sometimes you think, that was so close, and how it could have been catastrophic.

“And sometimes it is catastrophic, sometimes it is fatal.”

Lawless emerged from surgery at about 5 a.m. Monday morning. He was jacked on adrenaline, and he wasn’t done yet. There were two more patients to check on, who hadn’t required immediate surgery. Part of the story of the Danforth shooting is that it is not over. Not for Danielle Kane, who remains in hospital at St. Michael’s, as do two others, and may never walk again, and not for her family or for all the other families who have had a hole punched through their hearts by the murderous actions of a man with a gun.

“Sometimes patients with penetrating injuries will be in hospital for weeks and months,” Lawless says. “And that is part of the job, working toward how do we get these people out of the hospital — and how do we support them.”