On April 17, 2013, an explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas — about 15 minutes north of Waco — killed 15 people and injured 200 more. Many faculty, staff and students from Baylor University volunteered their time and expertise in the days following the tragedy, including Dr. Lauren Barron, a physician and faculty member who serves as associate director of Baylor’s medical humanities program. In this firsthand remembrance, Dr. Barron describes her opportunity to help one of the victims of the explosion. The photos that accompany her essay are ones she took that day in West.

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At the request of the McLennan County Medical Society, I was able to volunteer in West on April 25, the day of the memorial service for the fallen first responders and the day of President Obama’s visit. When I arrived, the Red Cross volunteers there were very apologetic about having physicians earlier in the week who had not seen many (or any) patients. They were concerned about not utilizing physician volunteers’ time wisely.

However, a female patient apparently came in late on Wednesday night whom they were quite concerned about. They asked if I was willing to make a home visit, and of course I readily agreed.

At the time of the explosion, the woman had been looking at the fertilizer plant fire from her small home nearby. She took most of the force of the blast in her face, neck and upper chest. By the time I saw her, the woman had been discharged from a hospital in a neighboring community and had not been able to afford much in the way of medication or the medical supplies needed to change her bandages.

So, I set out with a Red Cross volunteer/nurse/firefighter, a social worker from Austin, and one of the medical residents from the Waco Family Health Center, Dr. Bill McCunniff.

It took a bit of doing for us to get to where the patient was staying — in a house with relatives on a rural road that Google Maps didn’t know about. But when we arrived, we were able to check her wounds and change her extensive dressings.

She had more than 300 stitches, mostly on her face, neck and upper arms. We also found two areas of gauze packing in her neck that were becoming quite uncomfortable for her and needed to be removed, given the risk of infection before her May 2 follow-up appointment with the surgeons who had repaired her wound. We were also able to call in antibiotics, something that had not been done (understandably) in all the chaos, and I arranged an appointment with her primary care physician for the following Monday afternoon.

It was a joy and a privilege to be able to care for this young woman, especially with the Red Cross volunteers and the young intern who accompanied me.

The patient was in so much pain, I would not have been able to remove the gauze packing without the help of the social worker, who sat on the other side and helped distract the young woman with relaxation and breathing exercises in such a way that it was rather like having an anesthesiologist make a house call with me!

Without the social worker’s expertise, this woman would have surely had to go through all the difficulty, discomfort and financial burden of going to the emergency room again — after having been through so much already. The social worker was also able to spend quite a bit of time with the patient’s family, who were also dealing with their own trauma.

And I don’t have words enough to praise her the nurse from Tyler — also a firefighter and Red Cross volunteer. It would have taken several hours for the other doctor and me to care for this patient without her slapping exactly what we needed into our hands almost before we asked. She handled all the bandages and juggled all the supplies, freeing us up to give our full attention to the patient.

So, having our ragtag group — spontaneously assembled with exactly who and what we needed — made receiving a house call seem like a miracle for this patient and her family. Forget time, forget cost effectiveness — it was all worth it just for this one patient.

As family physicians, we are ideally suited to make house calls. I found the same situation to be the case after the earthquake in Turkey — that home visits for certain elderly patients and others with difficulty mobilizing or with transportation obstacles were very, very helpful.

Any physician or medical professional who volunteers several days after a disaster needs to understand that there may be very little that they end up doing, so I recommend taking a book or paperwork, and plan to chat with the amazing Red Cross volunteers (many of whom have participated in disaster relief all over the country).

On the other hand, there may be just one patient — just one — whom they were destined to care for that day, but would have missed out on helping if they had decided not to go.

DISCLAIMER: Various details of this account have been altered to protect patient confidentiality.