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Dead multiple times, saved by trauma team

By CNN

CO: MAN REUNITES WITH TRAUMA TEAM THAT SAVED HIS LIFE

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    COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado (KOAA) — A little girl who is too young to fully understand she is lucky her dad is alive watched as her father returned to UCHealth Memorial Hospital to greet the team that saved him with smiles and hugs.

“Every time I think about, ‘Hey, I’m so grateful to be here for my daughter,’ I just think about how many people it took to get me here,” said accident survivor Cowboy Lopez.

“In a really bad situation, I’ve come out really good. I feel like really blessed, blessed by the best, I say,” said Lopez.

The phrase “really bad situation” is an understatement.

“I was dead a few times for sure,” said Lopez.

“He was mostly dead,” said UCHealth Memorial trauma surgeon Dr. Brian Leininger.

“Outcomes like this are a true testament to the hours of training that we put in every year. It’s a testament to the system that we have in the city,” said Colorado Springs Firefighter Paramedic Lt. Joshua Buck.

Working on a skid loader at his shop TrueFixAuto, in an instant, Lopez was trapped under body-crushing weight from it.

“The hydraulics collapsed, and then the bucket is what fell on top of my back,” said Lopez. “The realization of what had happened and the amount of pain I was in was almost unbearable.”

“It broke most of the bones in his chest, collapsed one of his lungs, caused serious internal bleeding in his abdomen, major damage to his pelvis,” said Dr. Leininger. “The injury also suffocated him because the weight had been sitting on his chest long enough that he could not breathe and blood could not circulate.”

A lot aligned that day for help to happen in rapid succession.

The accident happened less than a mile from Fire Station 8 near South Academy Boulevard. The firefighters happened to already be at their truck, and the medical lieutenant in a mobile unit with whole blood was already in the area, just two to three minutes away.

Whole blood carried by Colorado Springs firefighters was added to trauma protocol a little more than two years ago.

Out of a little more than 200 cases where it has been given, Lopez’s is among the worst-case scenarios.

“Out of all of the drugs that we carry, hundreds of drugs, this is one that has an immediate impact that you can see,” said Buck.

“To have a shot at doing anything for him, he had to not be dead when he got here, and the fact that the firefighters and the medics were able to give him whole blood, I believe, is why he arrived here alive,” said Dr. Leininger.

Even with the blood, doctors say Lopez was actively dying when he arrived at the hospital. The skill of UCHealth Memorial’s emergency department team made way for several trauma surgeons to work on countering his injuries.

“We figure out what is the biggest threat to the patient’s life right at that moment and we address that, and then once we’re satisfied with that, we move on to the next thing and the next thing,” said Dr. Leininger.

A half dozen surgeries, months in the hospital, and more than a year of rehab followed. Firefighters, doctors, nurses and therapists are the reason he is telling his story.

“When you have had so many injuries that you never know if you’re going to be the person you were before, and in a lot of ways, I’m not,” said Lopez.

“He got hurt so badly that he needed just about every single thing that Memorial had,” said Dr. Leininger.

A man whose expertise is car repair experienced firsthand what it takes to fix people.

“They [the medical staff] would come in for their job, but whenever they were in that room with me, it just felt like they were my aunt or my sister or a family member caring for it,” said Lopez. “I had no idea what whole blood was, but I certainly do now.”

Lopez thanks his higher power and the dozens of pros on the UCHealth Memorial team who were determined to help him live after dying.

This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. KOAA verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

Why is one corner of China’s internet insisting a golden era never existed?

By CNN
Hong Kong (CNN) — Something weird has been happening on China’s internet. One small and vocal corner has been claiming the country’s most famous historical dynasty never existed.That’s the Tang, which ruled China from 618 AD to 907 AD, a period that saw huge territorial expansion, booming international trade and the flourishing of a high culture envied far beyond its borders. Every child learns about the Tang at school; historical dramas inspired by its palace intrigues are a staple of state TV.Claiming that the 300-year dynasty was actually a myth is akin to saying the American Civil War never happened, or telling a Brit that the Magna Carta is a fiction. But in recent months it’s been spreading among China’s very online population, posing a headache for a ruling Communist Party obsessed with controlling how its citizens talk about their 5,000 years of fractious and contested history.It all appears to have started when a history influencer named Qiao Yu deployed some baffling astrological data in a video in May, to “prove” the Tang had never existed.The outlandish claim has since spread far and wide. Reports later emerged that people were calling up the tourism bureau in Xi’an, the site of the ancient Tang capital, to demand it close down because the dynasty itself had been shown to be a hoax.The hashtag “the Tang dynasty doesn’t exist” now has tens of millions of views on China’s X-like Weibo.What motivated the hoax and its spread is hard to pin down. The Tang dynasty has been criticized in the past by Chinese nationalists as its founding emperor was not from the Han ethnic group that makes up most of China’s people. The basis of Qiao Yu’s claim is that the succeeding Song dynasty actually began far earlier than traditionally accepted, therefore canceling out the Tang. The Song dynasty was of ethnic Han origin.“This is basically insane,” said William Kirby, a professor of China studies at Harvard University, adding that there are facts in history and “the Tang dynasty is definitely one of them.”“It was much more than a Chinese dynasty. It was an inner Asian dynasty as well,” he said.As the fallacy spread on social media, China’s powerful and tightly controlled state media waded into the controversy.Many parents say that, thanks to the hoax, their children now feel confused about historical facts, the Nanjing Daily reported last month.Three days later, The Paper, a media outlet affiliated with the Shanghai government, was more strident. “Only when rational inquiry becomes the foundation of public life will historical nihilism truly lose the conditions that allow it to flourish,” it said in a commentary.“Historical nihilism” is a term coined by the ruling communist party that refers to discussion or research that challenges its version of China’s long history. The party itself is a relative newcomer to that story, coming to power in 1949 following a decades-long civil war that tore the country apart.By mid-August the Tang controversy had attracted the attention of the party’s mouthpiece. In an editorial, the People’s Daily called the claim “absurd,” and issued a warning: “Once young people begin to doubt our national history, our cultural confidence will become like water without a source or a tree without roots, and Chinese-style modernization will lose its profound historical perspective.”In recent years, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has tightened the party’s grip on history and sought harsher penalties for those who dare to challenge the official account.Xi himself has publicly evoked the past glory of the Tang. In 2023 he hosted leaders from several Central Asian countries in Xian, the ancient Tang capital and terminus of the Silk Road along which goods and ideas used to flow between China and Europe.The ceremony featured dancers and performers in Tang-style dress, observers noting the nod to a Tang past when foreign envoys came to pay tribute at the emperor’s court.Using the past to criticize the presentFor a thousand years, Chinese people have used reflections on history to reimagine the past, as a creative way to criticize or approach the present.For example, in the economic boom years of the early 2010s, amid growing criticism of the fixation on consumerism and bourgeois lifestyles, the hardships the Chinese people had undergone during Japan’s brutal occupation during WWII became a favored topic for intellectuals, according to Rana Mitter, a Harvard Kennedy School historian specializing in modern China.But that discussion also allowed some to point out that the current discourse didn’t give enough credit to the Kuomintang troops who fought the Japanese – but who were also the opponents of Mao Zedong’s communists, Mitter said.Even though the Tang era was more than a thousand years ago, any suggestion – however fanciful – that it never existed could be an irritant for the party, said Mitter.“Certainly under Xi, the CCP now honors the longer trajectory of Chinese history. This means that all history needs to point in a direction that suggests unified (rather than split) identity, historical and cultural continuity, and an idea of ‘China’ as a long-standing entity that has been continuous through history,” he said.Callum, a 24-year-old Beijing resident, told CNN that questioning the Tang’s existence could be a way to rebel against established wisdom and a way for China’s young – faced with a slowing economy and greater competition for jobs and resources – to criticize authorities.“It is a way for people to attack the established authorities. It is almost like saying ‘those so-called experts are nothing special. They have all been misleading people. I am the one who understands the truth, and I have exposed them all.’”As of mid-August, Qiao Yu’s accounts have been blocked and all of their videos taken down. Any search of Chinese social media questioning if the Tang dynasty existed now pulls up content condemning such lines of reasoning.In its editorial on the controversy, the People’s Daily attempted to have the final word.“Chinese civilization has endured for five thousand years,” it said, “and the Golden Age of the Tang Dynasty stands as one of its most dazzling chapters.”CNN’s Shuai Zhang contributed to the reporting.The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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