Natalie Vanderstay a 43 year old local area Las Vegas nurse who was shot in the stomach and also received some Shrapnel to her leg, knew she would die unless she did something. She ripped off her flannel shirt and tied it tightly around her leg to stem the bleeding. She kept crawling until she reached a fence surrounding the concert area and she mustered up the strength to jump it. Once on the other side of the fence, she hunkered down until she spotted a cab. She made it to the cab, who took her to the hospital.
Explained the critically wounded woman, ‘I just tried to stay low but I was being trampled,’
Adding, ‘Everyone was stepping on everybody and, unfortunately, I had to step on people too just to get where I needed to get to.’
To get out alive, Vanderstay willed herself to jump over a fence and escape the concert ground.
She then hunkered down with a group of strangers, waiting for the gunfire to stop.
From there, Vanderstay spotted a cab with three people already inside.
She told them she’d been shot and needed to get to a hospital.
The strangers took her in and put pressure on her stomach wound, and the quick-thinking cab driver knew not to take her to the nearest hospital but to University Medical Center, the only Level I trauma center in the state.
Told the nurse, ‘If it wasn’t for that cab driver, I wouldn’t be here,’
‘And I don’t know who he is. He did everything to get me here.’
Vanderstay is one of the lucky ones but it was her determination that kept her alive until she could reach help. Many people would have laid back and waited and bled to death in the process. She is a woman that couldn’t be stopped.
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