The Orlando Doctor Behind the Bloody Shoes on Facebook

June 17--A week before the bloody massacre at Pulse nightclub, Dr. Joshua Corsa bought a new pair of shoes from the REI outdoor company.

They were Keens and he liked them because he could put them on quickly -- one of those important little details for a senior resident who has to rush around a busy Level I trauma center like Orlando Regional Medical Center.

Little did he know that in a few days those sneakers would become a symbol of all that's good and evil in this world.

It started with a text from an attending physician at the trauma center: possible active shooter and up to three injured with gunshot wounds.

Corsa had started his shift on Saturday about 5 a.m. and had wrapped up the last trauma case on that early Sunday morning. That text wasn't particularly alarming for him.

In recent years, he had treated patients injured in drive-by shootings and young children struck by a car that drove through the wall of an Orange County day-care center.

"So I started walking down to the trauma bay," Corsa recalled on Thursday afternoon in his first media interview since he posted a photo of his blood-stained shoes on Facebook. "And then I got the trauma page."

It was 2:16 a.m. and the page had two words: TRAUMA NOW.

"So then I started running and got to the trauma bay and they were wheeling in the first two victims," he said. "Obviously I didn't have time to change. I just grabbed a handful of gloves and went to work."

Halfway through assessing the second patient, "I turn around and look down the hallway to where the patients were being dropped off in the ambulance bay and I just saw a line of stretchers coming at me," said Corsa, 35.

Corsa joined the Army after he finished high school in North Carolina.

He spent six years in the Army, where he was a medic. He came back home and got his bachelor's degree in two years and then went to medical school.

Throughout those years he worked full-time as a firefighter/paramedic.

But none of those experiences compared to what he saw on Sunday morning.

On Sunday afternoon, after all the patients were stabilized, Corsa finally got a chance to disrobe. He changed his shoes, and exhausted, went home to his dog, an American Dingo named Fenway.

He didn't think about his shoes until Monday morning when he got back to the hospital at 4 a.m.

"And really that's about the first time that it hit me... It felt so abstract. You see these mass shootings on the news and everywhere else and it's become so commonplace and I kept looking at TV and it kept saying Orlando, and I thought even though I'd seen it, that's wrong. It can't be. It still hasn't sunk in that it happened here," he said.

So he sat down right then and there in the call room and posted a picture of his shoes on Facebook, with a note about the blood stains.

"I don't know which were straight, which were gay, which were black, or which were Hispanic. What I do know is that they came to us in wave upon wave of suffering, screaming, and death. And somehow, in that chaos, doctors, nurses, technicians, police, paramedics, and others, performed super human feats of compassion and care."

Corsa pledged to keep those shoes on until the last survivor of Pulse shooting is discharged from ORMC.

"They've become a part of me. It's in me. I feel like I have to carry that reminder with me as long as [those patients] are still under my care. So this is a tangible reminder that the work's not done. That there's still a long way to go," he said.

Corsa has one more year in ORMC. Starting next week, he'll begin interviewing for jobs.

The suit he's planning to wear is still at the dry cleaner across from Pulse nightclub.

nmiller@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5158

Copyright 2016 - Orlando Sentinel