Help save a life…

Sunday 8-7-2005

9:55pm… We are dispatched to a man down, and unconscious in front of a restaurant.

Let me just throw this out there as well; Just a few minutes prior to this call, our ambulance was dispatched to another call outside of our fire district, and they ended up transporting to our local trauma hospital (approx. 25mins away). To make it even more interesting there isn’t another ambulance within 35mins of where we are responding.

Anyway, when we get on scene we find an unconscious man, approximately 35 years old, on his back bleeding from his mouth and right eye. We talked with a witness who said the man walked form the restaurant and tripped over a parking cement block. He said the man landed on his face, rolled over, and became unconscious. He also told us that the man had been drinking but said he didn’t drink enough to intoxicate him.

We immediately felt that this type of fall was worthy of full C-Spine precautions (c-collar, backboard… everything). After securing him, we inserted an oral airway (a small plastic piece used to keep the tongue from blocking the airway) so we could ventilate.

I was put in charge of ventilation. I was told to keep time with his breathing; this wasn’t too hard since he was making small gasps for air which made it easy to judge when to give him ventilations. I continued ventilations for the next 10mins until he completely stopped breathing all together. We then started CPR, and got him back to small gasps fairly quickly. I then resumed ventilations.

Finally, 20mins later the ambulance arrived. 20mins felt like a lifetime.

When we were loading him onto the gurney and into the ambulance he had opened his eyes and was starting to become conscious again.

After all was said and done, it felt great. What a call.

After we returned to the station I started thinking that this was my first time really saving a life. It didn’t seem like much at the time but overall it took awesome team work from the whole crew, and I feel proud that I played my part in keeping that man alive.

posted by Unknown at 10:05 PM