Vital Signs
A DOMESTIC AGENDA
Lots of people support an end to domestic violence. Lawrence Mester, a member of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Advanced Response Team (DHART) crew, has gone to greater lengths than most people to do so—almost 300 miles, in fact.
In 1999, he flew a DHART mission with a patient who had been stabbed—in front of her three children—by her husband. She recovered and became involved with an organization called Walk to End Domestic Violence (WEDV). This past October, she was scheduled to give the keynote address at the national WEDV Walk/Run at Battery Park in Manhattan. She had had two wishes after the attack: to walk again (she does, with assistance) and to meet the DHART crew that had "saved her life."
So the WEDV organizers planned a surprise for the day of her Battery Park address. They tracked down Mester but didn't say anything to her, and had him flown to New York for the event. After she gave her talk, they brought Mester out to meet her. While she was sharing her story with the crowd, Mester recalls, "there wasn't a dry eye in Battery Park." A.S.