Essentia nurse in right place at right time — again

Most mornings, Bonnie Lee's commute to the Essentia Health-32nd Avenue Clinic is uneventful. That suits the longtime registered nurse just fine. On April 27, however, Lee's drive to work was anything but routine.

Call it a twist of fate.

Lee, an RN since 1993, moved to Fargo in 2020 after her sons enrolled in college. “I felt like they really needed their mother,” she said with a laugh. “But it turns out young men in college do not need their mother nearby.” She joined Essentia as a dialysis nurse — “my dream job,” she calls it — after relocating from Red Lake Falls, Minnesota, just as COVID-19 was escalating.

That Monday morning this past April, Lee was running late after an absentminded mishap in which she backed her truck into her garage door. “It’s a brand-new truck and I’m really careful with it,” she says. After taking a few moments to steady her nerves, Lee set out for the clinic.

The delay proved to be a blessing in disguise. Less than five minutes later, she happened upon a terrible accident involving a semitrailer and a car at the intersection of 32nd Avenue South and 39th Street. The crash occurred seconds before Lee approached.

“If I had not backed into the garage door, I would have been at work,” she acknowledges.

Instead, she was among the first people on scene and sprang into action, her fight-or-flight response and nurse’s instincts fully engaged. Two bystanders were nearby. Lee yelled to them, asking if someone was still in the car. “Yes, and he’s not breathing,” they shouted back.

Lee rushed to the passenger side, where the window had busted off at impact. The driver had been thrown across the seat. His head was pinned against his chest by the back of the bent seat. He was unconscious, not breathing and making “very deep, intermittent snoring sounds,” Lee recalled. She grabbed his shirt and the side of his pants and log-rolled him back just enough to reduce pressure on the airway. Lee heard the man gasp. She hurried around the vehicle to the driver’s side to continue assisting him from inside.

Fire crews soon arrived and began to cut him free, but Lee stayed inside the man’s car, talking to him as he drifted in and out of consciousness. At one point, his phone rang. It was his mother. He had been speaking to her when he was hit. He handed the phone to Lee.

“I’m with him,” she told his mom. “He’s getting the help he needs.”

Lee eventually exited the car and yielded to the first responders. That’s when she noticed the scene that had developed next to the intersection, behind the car. Trucks from nearby All Pro Towing had lined up to block traffic and protect Lee and the injured man.

“These men had surrounded us with their tow trucks so that we were safe,” Lee says. “That’s what really chokes me up about this. Nobody asked these guys to do that. Nobody asked them to intervene.”

It wasn’t the first time Lee had found herself in the middle of a crisis.

In September 2023, just after finishing work — again at Essentia’s 32nd Avenue Clinic — she and her son came upon a motorcycle crash involving a suspected drunk driver. The teen motorcycle rider who had been hit was severely injured, his foot severed. With no equipment, Lee improvised. A man and his wife had witnessed the accident and stopped to help. Lee yelled for a belt. The onlooking man handed her his. She fashioned a tourniquet and tightened it around the teen’s thigh.

Just as she did this past April, Lee stayed with the injured teen until paramedics arrived. The teen survived, though he lost his foot.

Essentia later honored Lee with a special award.

“I’m not big on awards, but the camaraderie meant everything,” she says. “Just knowing people cared. Just to have people say, ‘We know you went through that and we’re here if you need to talk,’ that really helped.”

These moments weigh on her. “I sat and cried for three days after this last one,” Lee admits, the emotional toll no doubt intensified because of the phone call she shared with the driver’s mother moments after the crash.

Still, she knows she would stop again. It’s who she is.

“I tend to run toward these things,” she says. “God places you where you need to be.”

For Bonnie Lee, that place just happens to be wherever someone needs help.

Photo courtesy of WDAY-TV in Fargo.