JOPLIN, MO (KCTV) -
As an emergency room doctor, Jim Riscoe chooses to focus on the positive whenever possible.
When tragedy touched Joplin in the form of a mile-wide tornado, Riscoe raced up the street from his house and saw what was left of the hospital he's called home for years.
"You go on autopilot, and you don't really take the time to acknowledge what you've lost. We lost our hospital where we've worked for so long, where our children were born, where our parents died," Jim Riscoe said.
Riscoe is no stranger to unimaginable disaster. During the Hyatt collapse, he was in charge of the makeshift morgue and identifying the victims. He went to Haiti and helped wherever he was needed.
Now in the hours after the tornado took out much of the northern part of town, he jumped into action, setting up a temporary hospital at Joplin's Memorial Hall.
"No chance to sit around and say, 'Isn't it awful?' We know how awful it was. One hundred sixty dead and thousands injured. We had thousands of houses down and the city looked like Hiroshima," Riscoe said.
Soon Memorial Hall was seeing patients, helping the wounded and filling, as best it could, the tremendous gap left in the community when one of its two hospitals was taken out. But it wasn't easy.
"They were pretty hairy. Making it up as we went," Riscoe said.
For the next several days, sleep was a secondary thought. When Riscoe couldn't go any longer he would catch a few hours at Memorial Hall, going home only to shower.
It was in those trips to and from, and he wasn't focused on the patient in front of him, he could let his mind think about what had happened.
"Driving home at night, back home the street lights were out and it was just a war zone," Riscoe said.
Eventually, mobile units were set up and the hospital staff operated out of those for most of the summer.
Riscoe says it was tough. They lost their Level 2 trauma rating the second the hospital was hit. Now at a time they were needed most, they couldn't see the most serious patients. They couldn't help.
For people like Riscoe, who have devoted their life to treating others, this has been one of the hardest things to handle. But the spirit of those around him - from his colleagues to his community - helped him get by and once again focus on the positive.
"It has been a hard, hard push both physically and professionally, but it has really brought us together, and we've had fun," he said.
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