Orlando surgeon will wear bloody shoes until last nightclub shooting survivor leaves hospital

Doctors, nurses, technicians, police, and paramedics “performed super human feats of compassion and care,” in the wake of the nightclub massacre in Orlando, Dr. Joshua Corsa said in a social media post Tuesday.

Corsa is the Senior Resident at the Orlando Regional Medical Center’s Department of Surgery. His message included a photo of his bloody shoes.

“These are my work shoes from Saturday night. They are brand new, not even a week old. On these shoes, soaked between its fibers, is the blood of 54 innocent human beings,” Corsa stated, “I don’t know which were straight, which were gay, which were black, or which were Hispanic. What I do know is that they came to us in wave upon wave of suffering, screaming, and death.”

The surgeon noticed the shoes next to a pile of dirty scrubs when he showed up to work Tuesday morning. “I had forgotten about them until now,” Corsa said, “This blood, which poured out of those patients and soaked through my scrubs and shoes, will stain me forever.”

Corsa described the blood stains as “Rorschach patterns of red” in which he will forever see the faces of the victims and “the faces of those who gave everything they had in those dark hours.”

The surgeon said he will continue to wear the shoes until the last of the survivors leaves his hospital. After that, he plans to keep the shoes in his office.

“I want to see them in front of me every time I go to work, for on June 12, after the worst of humanity reared its evil head, I saw the best of humanity come fighting right back. I never want to forget that night,” he said.

Another doctor at the hospital said that of the six patients who remain in the intensive care unit, one or two are still “profoundly ill.”

Dr. Michael Cheatham added, “The big question is what their long-term outcome will be.”

Cheatham suspects they may survive but will likely have lasting impacts on their health and functionality.

Even hardened trauma surgeons and nurses were brought to tears by the sight of so many bleeding people lining up in the emergency room.

“They were dropped off in truckloads, in ambulance-loads,” said Dr. Kathryn Bondani. The hospital ran out of ambulances, so firefighters, police and truck-driving citizens ferried the injured.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.