The two bombs that went off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15 left three people dead and sent another 275 to hospitals. Yesterday, the last of those injured victims, a preschool teacher from Towson, Md., was finally released.
Erika Brannock, 29, left Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston yesterday, seven weeks to the day after being wounded by the first blast as she waited for her mother to complete the marathon. Doctor’s amputated her left leg above the knee; she also suffered extensive damage to her right knee. In total, Brannock underwent 11 surgeries, The Baltimore Sun reports.
Upon leaving the hospital yesterday, Brannock told WBUR, a Boston radio station, that in the immediate aftermath of the bombings, she was tended to by a woman from California who called emergency responders to her position.
A woman Brannock now calls her angel appeared “as soon as I opened my eyes,” she said. “Right after I had said that, she was there, grabbed my hand and said, ‘I’m Joan from California and I’m not going to let you go.’ ”
Joan, the 40-something woman in a yellow jacket with shoulder-length brown hair, could see what Brannock couldn’t see yet — that the 29-year-old preschool teacher was in serious trouble.
Joan “started screaming for people to come help me,” Brannock said.
For the first few days of Brannock’s stay at Beth Israel Deaconess, she wasn’t far from the hospital room holding Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the suspects who allegedly set the bombs. Hospital staff would take Brannock past the cordon around Tsarnaev’s room on her way to surgery, which Brannock recalled as one of the most harrowing parts of her experience.
“I started to have nightmares that he would get out of his bed, he would come find me, he would blow up the hospital,” she told WBUR. Tsarnaev was later moved to a federal prison hospital in Devens, Mass.
During the 50 days she was hospitalized, Brannock’s family established a fund to help cover her extensive treatment, recovery, and the living expenses as she returns home. She’ll need prosthetics, but she told the Sun that she plans to be able to walk again once her right leg is healed.
