“He had visibly a small blue puncture on the right side of his abdomen, and another on the right side of his back where the bullet emerged. Both were very small. But it was obvious some emergency surgery would have to be performed sooner or later. I was told that Dr. Sanderson had been summoned from Shreveport, and that Drs. Urban Maes and James Rives were already en route from New Orleans. Dr. Maes had been appointed to the chair of surgery at L.S.U.’s new medical college, of which Dr. Vidrine, also present in Baton Rouge at the time, was dean, along with his position as superintendent of Charity Hospital. He was in general charge of the patient’s case. At some point in the proceedings word was brought to us that a motoring accident had forced Dr. Rives’s car off the road, and that they would be delayed some time by the difficulty of securing service at that time of night to have their car dragged back to the highway. When informed of this, Dr. Vidrine decided not to wait any longer.”
Huey’s very close friends, Seymour Weiss and Conservation Commissioner Robert Maestri, had reached Baton Rouge some time prior to this. It is Mr. Weiss’s clear recollection that the decision to wait no longer before performing an emergency operation was reached “by all of us” before word was received of the mischance encountered by Drs. Maes and Rives.
“As I recall the circumstances,” Seymour Weiss says, “Huey’s condition was getting worse by the minute. Dr. Vidrine insisted that any further delay was progressively lessening the Senator’s chances. The other physicians present agreed that the outlook was not hopeful. Vidrine was the physician in charge and the rest of us were laymen. The time came when we either had to agree to let the operation be performed at once, or take upon ourselves the risk of endangering the man’s life. Mrs. Long and the children had not yet reached Baton Rouge, but in view of the medical opinions, the rest of us--all being individuals who were close to Huey--were just about unanimous in agreeing that the doctors should proceed.”
Amid the almost inconceivable confusion in and out of the hospital, one person seems to have kept her head, and that was Miss Mary Ann Woods, now Mrs. Arthur Champagne, the supervisor of nurses. Assigning floor nurses and trainees to duties so as to make the best possible disposition of available personnel, she set out to provide four special attendants for the critically injured Senator, two to serve at night and two by day.