7 months ago Dr. King ran the Boston Marathon. He had just left the finish line area when he got word of an explosion.
He had no idea at that point what he was in for.
"The day started off perfect," he said.
That's how David King remembers the start of the Boston Marathon last April. He finished in a little more than 3 hours and had just left the recovery area when he heard about an explosion.
"In my head I was interpreting explosion to mean fire in a kitchen, or a restaurant next to the finish line," Dr. King said.
King, a former Army doctor, knows a lot about bomb blasts. He served overseas, saving lives in iraq and Afghanistan, so when he got to Mass General that day he immediately saw familar wounds.
"I saw the injuries, more importantly the pattern of the injuries I had seen a hundred or a thousand times before in Iraq and Afghanistan, and no one had to tell me, I knew exactly what had happened," he said.
Dr. King and his team treated 15 people that day, operating for more than 30 hours straight.
"Was there a point where you said, 'That could have been me'?", we asked.
"For me and my job, I don't think so, it's counterproductive to think like that," Dr. King said. "But now that it's all over and you're not involved in that acute event, certainly you think that all the time."
He's run a lot since then, but the New york Marathon is his first major race.
He runs with the blessing of patients like Roseanne Sdoia. Roseanne was standing next to the mailbox on Boyleston Street when the second blast happened. She lost her right leg.
"Thank you for running for me in the marathon," she told Dr. King. "My pleasure," he said.
Dr. King will run New York for Roseanne, and for all his patients.
"I feel like it's going to be liberating, some kind of a celebration to crawl out from the darkness that was Boston in 2013," Dr. King said.
And yes, he is running in Boston in 2014.
