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ONE HALLOWEEN NIGHT
by
One fine windy, full moon with scudding clouds autumn evening close to Halloween my partner and I were paged out for a one car accident 18 miles north of town. Radio coverage is poor and cell phone coverage non-existent, so we didn’t get any updates till we got on scene. The deputy on scene told us that the car had left the road for no apparent reason probably 40 minutes ago and gone through a fence a couple hundred feet out into a field full of sagebrush. He also told us that the bystanders who had called 911 had told him that when they checked on the patient she was unconscious and ‘twitching’. Hmm. So, we headed out to the car with the jump kit and monitor to a middle aged female with no obvious trauma not breathing and showing PEA on the monitor. We knew the fire district had been paged out and decided to do CPR and monitor till we got more help to move her to the truck rather than try to start IVs in the dirt, dark, and wind and then not pull the lines out moving her through the brush. Once the fire kids showed up we put her on a backboard and carried her to the ambulance, doing fairly reasonable CPR through the brush. One of the fire gods was struggling to get the cot out of the ambulance and his cynical assistant chief and long time medic moving the patient with us supportively said “Jesus Jake, just get out of the way, you look like a monkey trying to screw a football”. Thank heavens the cot was available or we might have dropped the patient laughing. As soon as we put the patient back on the cot and momentarily halted CPR to load her in the ambulance the patient CAME BACK TO LIFE. Her arms jerked, and her entire torso lifted off the cot. Needless to say we just about peed ourselves. This woman has been dead for 40 minutes. It’s a little close to Halloween for this to be funny – where is the black cat? We loaded her up and started working the code on the way back to town and it happened again! This time we had the monitor going in decent light, and we realized she had an implanted defibrillator firing – it really wasn’t the devil.
So, we worked the code to the hospital who quickly called it. Then comes the icing on the cake. Turns out the woman’s drunk husband was in the ER waiting room. He’d gotten drunk, had chest pain, and our patient had driven him to town, gone home, and was coming back to get him. When told that his wife had expired his only concern was the condition of the car and whether he could get a ride home.
From the author
Your web site is great - thank you so much.
I work for an ambulance service in Wyoming. My full time job is not EMS, but EMS has been a passion (mainly ski patrol and ambulance) since 1982. So, here are a couple stories for your medical fuster clucks. Hopefully you'll enjoy them.
Thanks again for your website.
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