“This job can be hours of boredom followed by hours of sheer terror,” Walker said. “You don’t try to find people to come to your practice, but when your pager goes off, you get there as fast as you can to respond to whatever is going on.”

Walker is one of two newly hired traumatologists at Intermountain McKay-Dee Hospital. These physicians specialize in the treatment of the most severe physical injuries that require immediate medical attention.

Over the past half of the last century, Walker said the American College of Surgeons recognized the need to organize people into a category of specialized care. Those people are the ones who sustain such catastrophic injuries, treatment within the first hour means the difference between life and death.

“They call it the Golden Hour,” Walker said. “There’s that group of patients who would otherwise probably die in that first hour after an injury, such as internal bleeding in the abdomen or chest cavity for example, and if you can get to them within that first hour, they have a better chance to live to fight another day.”

Walker said traumas are divided into two groups, penetrating trauma and blunt trauma. Both types can be life threatening, not only needing immediate care, but a team of other specialists on board with differing expertise.

“If someone falls and hits their head and sustains a brain bleed, we will pull a neurologist in,” he said. “We pull in specialists all the time, depending on the injury sustained, and the trauma surgeon kind of becomes this person’s primary care physician. So we are helping in the aid and management with other specialists but we get to deal with the patient as a whole as well.”

Some of the hardest traumas Walker has dealt with have included obstetric emergencies.

“You have a patient who is pregnant and they get into a car accident and all of a sudden you’re not just dealing with one individual’s life, but two,” he said. “Those can be really difficult and it’s especially difficult when those don’t go well.”

Other times, Walker said, he has no explanation of why a person lived through a traumatic event.

“I had one patient who had a couple of gunshot wounds to the head. For some unknown, unexplainable reason, the bullets just went right outside of the skull, just underneath the skin. This person was either incredibly lucky or they were protected by whatever you choose to believe in. Sometimes you walk out of the trauma bay scratching your head, because you just can’t explain it.”

Walker was born and raised in Boise, Idaho, and became interested in medicine as he watched his father work in the field. In fact, he and two of his brothers have all gone into medicine.

Walker graduated from the University of Utah and Washington School of Medicine. After his residency in general surgery at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he completed his fellowship at the University of Michigan.

After working as a trauma surgeon in Michigan, he said he jumped at the opportunity to come to Utah as McKay-Dee Hospital was taking its trauma program to the next level. He and his wife, Melissa, their six children, two cats and a dog, moved to the state this summer. When he isn’t working at the hospital, he says he’s an “unpaid” driver, hauling his children around to various activities.

“I love the job and I love it even more when things turn out well,” he said. “If I could give one piece of advice to people it would be prevention. Prevention is key. If you ask my kids, they will say I’m fanatical about helmets. Getting on a bike, skateboard, ATV, scooter, mountain bike — putting on that helmet is so important. It’s tragic when we deal with a head injury that could have been prevented. The same goes for seatbelts. Unintentional accidents happen all the time, but if you can do something to help prevent severe injuries, please take the time to do it.”

Dr. Athanasios Bramos will be joining Walker in August.