I once responded to a cardiac arrest call. These are the most intense thing I've ever experienced and require a massive adrenaline mode to process and act during. The ride to them is like a fight-or-flight overload which primes you to see/do one specific thing.
So I pull up and there's a crowd. I have to blare the sirens to disperse them, then in the middle see my patient. He's being held down by two other men while a third performs what he thinks is CPR. This patient, who is supposed to be naturally dead, is actively fighting them. If their compressions weren't so dog shit they would have probably killed this guy who they found passed out drunk. Every neuron in my brain short-circuited trying to understand what I was looking at and what they thought they were trying to accomplish. They even said they weren't giving him mouth-to-mouth because he was yelling at them.
Either that or just a panic-brained attempt to do the sick person thing. I've never seen bystanders do useful CPR unless they have a medical background.
I saw the stats for how often CPR revives someone when performed under ideal conditions and that was a sobering moment. TV really does distort how you see the world.
It's wild to see that in a trauma bay. A full team with a combined experience of 100+ years, all the tools of modern medicine, surgery on standby, and it's still like 20% at best for me. That 20% is people who left emergency in a state stable enough for another ward so who knows how many of them survived the next week or year. In the field I didn't expect any of them to recover but reasoned that I couldn't kill them twice by trying everything.
I think good samaritan laws probably do and should cover them in that case. If the patient had actually needed CPR they might have gotten a bit of blood flowing even if their compressions were too shallow to do any real good. As long as I'm there within 6 minutes of it happening it's not going to kill him twice.
I once responded to a cardiac arrest call. These are the most intense thing I've ever experienced and require a massive adrenaline mode to process and act during. The ride to them is like a fight-or-flight overload which primes you to see/do one specific thing.
So I pull up and there's a crowd. I have to blare the sirens to disperse them, then in the middle see my patient. He's being held down by two other men while a third performs what he thinks is CPR. This patient, who is supposed to be naturally dead, is actively fighting them. If their compressions weren't so dog shit they would have probably killed this guy who they found passed out drunk. Every neuron in my brain short-circuited trying to understand what I was looking at and what they thought they were trying to accomplish. They even said they weren't giving him mouth-to-mouth because he was yelling at them.
:michael-laugh:
it's not even funny and yet it's fucking hilarious. is this what happens when people know about medical problems only from movies?
Either that or just a panic-brained attempt to do the sick person thing. I've never seen bystanders do useful CPR unless they have a medical background.
I saw the stats for how often CPR revives someone when performed under ideal conditions and that was a sobering moment. TV really does distort how you see the world.
It's wild to see that in a trauma bay. A full team with a combined experience of 100+ years, all the tools of modern medicine, surgery on standby, and it's still like 20% at best for me. That 20% is people who left emergency in a state stable enough for another ward so who knows how many of them survived the next week or year. In the field I didn't expect any of them to recover but reasoned that I couldn't kill them twice by trying everything.
Yeah. Medicine has gotten a lot better in my lifetime, but when you hit the limits its a sobering reminder that there are a lot of limits. : |
:horror:
How do you evade the personal injury lawyers chasing you with their Toyota corollas?
I think good samaritan laws probably do and should cover them in that case. If the patient had actually needed CPR they might have gotten a bit of blood flowing even if their compressions were too shallow to do any real good. As long as I'm there within 6 minutes of it happening it's not going to kill him twice.