ABC News(NEW YORK) — When Dr. Allan MacIntyre got word that a man who had been bitten by a tiger was being brought in to his Las Vegas hospital on Oct. 3, 2003, he said he wasn’t sure what he was in for at first.
“They don’t tell you that they’re bringing in a celebrity,” said MacIntyre, a general surgeon at University Medical Center. “They say we have…male patient that has been bitten by a tiger in respiratory distress. They’ll say it’s a Class One activation, which means everybody presents to the trauma bay.”
He soon found out the patient was Roy Horn, one of the legendary entertainers behind the famous “Siegfried and Roy” shows, who had been bitten by his white tiger, Mantecore, during a performance.
When Horn arrived at the hospital’s level I trauma center, doctors quickly determined he had suffered major puncture wounds to his neck.
“A tiger bite to the neck… We don’t see that on a daily basis like a gunshot wound, so you have no idea what to expect,” MacIntyre said.
The tiger’s teeth had gone in deep enough to damage enough blood vessels, causing serious internal bleeding, MacIntyre said, and the injuries “compromised Horn’s airway.”
“You’ve got to deal with that first,” MacIntyre said. “If you’re not breathing for over, like, three minutes, you will have irreversible brain death.”
Horn was rushed into emergency surgery.
Dr. Jay Coates, a trauma surgeon at UMC who operated on Horn, said, “We had to operate on his neck where the wounds were at and control the bleeding.”
The two doctors said Horn even died — at least once — before they revived him.
“Roy was in such distress from his airway — loss of airway — that his heart stopped multiple times,” MacIntyre said.
“He actually flatlined…or died,” Coates added. “We lost vital signs on him.”
Coates said that Horn left the hospital about a month after he was admitted. He said Horn “was with it enough to communicate with us, [but] he was still on a respirator intermittently.”
MacIntyre added that this was where the “real journey” began for the entertainer.
“You have to literally go back to, like, when you were an infant, and learn how to walk again, and how to talk again and how to swallow, and [Horn’s] drive, I believe, is what got him through this,” MacIntyre said.
Doctors were able to save Horn’s life, and he eventually made a remarkable recovery, but he had suffered a stroke, though when the stroke happened, and what caused the tiger to bite Horn, has been questioned.
Watch the full story on the season premiere of 20/20 FRIDAY, Sept. 27 at 9 p.m. ET on ABC.
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