The Other Victims: First Responders To Violent Disasters Often Suffer Alone

The night a gunman fired into a crowd of 22,000 people at the country music festival in Las Vegas in 2017, nursing supervisor Antoinette Mullan at University Medical Center was focused on one thing: saving lives.

She recalls dead bodies on gurneys across the triage floor, a trauma bay full of victims. But "in that moment, we're not aware of anything else but taking care of what's in front of us," Mullan says.

She calls that event, "the most horrific evening of my life." But in a career spanning 30 years, Mullan has experienced plenty of other tragic incidents in which she witnessed suffering and death.

She says she has tried to work through these painful memories, mostly on her own.

"I can tell you that after 30 years, I still have emotional breakdowns and I never know when it's going to hit me," she says.

In 2017, there were 346 mass shootings nationwide, including the Las Vegas massacre — one of the deadliest in U.S. history — according to Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit organization that tracks the country's gun-related deaths.

The group, which defines mass shootings as ones in which four or more people are killed or injured, has identified 159 so far this year, through July 3.

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