NORTHRIDGE : Trauma Center Staff, Patients Reunited

It was exactly one year ago that Los Angeles Fire Department paramedic Mark Savage helped pry Rod and Stacy Cornette from their burning car after a head-on crash.

On Friday, Savage craned his neck from a seat near the back of the auditorium at Northridge Hospital Medical Center to see the couple again at a reunion for Northridge trauma center patients, and the doctors, nurses, volunteers and rescue workers who helped them recover.

The ceremony is held each year to recognize the trauma center staff and to benefit the private nonprofit hospital during National Trauma Awareness Week.

The event was staged before an audience of staff and benefactors. But the handful of patients who came still found time to seek out the people who they remembered from their nightmarish first days in the trauma center.

There was the school-crossing guard hit by a car three years ago who walks with the help of a cane. She met the hospital volunteer who still calls her at home regularly and knows her children by name. There was the 17-year-old victim of a car accident, in a wheelchair, who met the physical therapists and doctors who worked with him after his spinal injury.

For Stacy Cornette, whose face still bears the scars of a near-fatal accident, the reunion was the first opportunity to meet those who had airlifted her, unconscious and burned over half her body, to the Northridge hospital.

Cornette spotted Savage’s blue paramedic uniform, and without knowing who he was, threw her arms around his neck.

“Thank you so much,” she said.

“You try not to let every rescue impact your personal life--it would take a toll,” said Savage, as he waited for the crowd to clear so he could talk to the Cornettes. “But this one--these two had so much going for them. This was one of the ones that touched me a bit.”