At first, Nathalie Vanderstay thought she was hearing firecrackers. Then came the screams rising above the music at the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas on Oct. 1, 2017, where she and her friends had been enjoying headlinerJason Aldeanamong a crowd of more than 20,000.
Again: pop, pop, pop.
Flat on the ground, she glanced down and saw she’d been shot in the leg. As a licensed vocational nurse, she knew to grab her flannel shirt and tie a tourniquet. But as she finished, a bullet hit her stomach, and pain seared through her.
In that moment, she says, “I realized, if I don’t get out of here, I’m going to die.”
Separated from her friends and bleeding from two bullet wounds, Vanderstay stumbled onto Las Vegas Boulevard and climbed into a cab — three passengers were inside — and collapsed on the back seat.
A passenger kept pressure on her stomach wound, and the cabdriver ran red lights and jumped curbs racing to a trauma center.
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“I could barely talk,” she says. “My body was shutting down.” Before being rushed into surgery, she made a final request to everyone in the room: “I said, ‘Please don’t let me die.'”
Now, five years later, she is sharing the details of her experience and painful journey of recovery.
“I feel like Route 91 has been swept under the rug,” she says. “We feel like we’ve been forgotten. It was so horrific.”
She says that despite enduring some incredible lows, she has been given the gift of community, comprised of other survivors who have helped her on her worst days.
“I’m grateful for the people I have in my life,” she says. “It keeps me going.”
source: people.com
