#3 of the Matrix

#3 of the Matrix……The Professionals

From the moment my daughter called 911, within minutes I had trained professonals around me…… We live one mile north of a very small town. Our emergency services have a station just a mile south of us, who in cooperation with a few other stations, cover the emergency needs for our county. The fire trucks are usually the first to arrive on the scene and this was no different, but it wasn’t 10 minutes before an ambulance was here…..

There are too many details to go into here….. The firemen got oxygen on me, ask about any medications I was on, ask me questions……..the paramedics arrived. It’s all a blur to me now but there was a blood pressure cuff put on me, I was given a shot, they kept talking to me, everyone was rushing around, I remember them saying they didn’t have time to take me in the ambulance and the helicopter was called….. Highway patrol were alerted to shut down the highway so the helicopter could land, I was wheeled out to the ambulance, a man kept telling me to lie still and they hooked me up to more equipment… the ambulance drove from our house out to the highway and I remember being loaded on the helicopter. One of the helicopter crew kept reassuring me….I remember him telling me to just hold on we would be there soon….I remember seeing some lights and after that there is nothing…… … Their report states that they put me on a pacer and cpr was performed in the air and there was communication problems over the radio between them and the hospital.

According to the hospital reports from the emergency room doctor’s records, I was having an attack when the helicopter crew rushed me into the hospital emergency room trauma room one…. The doctor wrote that I was unresponsive other than some mumbling and I kept grasping my chest. She wrote that I went into cardiac arrest, CPR was performed, and states later about capturing me on a pacer, and then inserted a ventilator tube. The cardiologist on call was alerted…. He states in his report that “the patient was moribund” when he arrived in the cath lab….. Most remarkable it was only 40 minutes from the time of my arrival to the hospital through trauma and into the cath lab, all because of individual professionals who knew what they were doing. The cardiologist report states that he did CPR on me twice more times during surgery. He informed my family later that they had lost me three times…..

From the surgery where they put a stent in me and put me on a heart balloon pump and kept me in a coma, I was transferred to ICU. I was told later that there was a nurse who stayed with me every minute, constantly for the first 24 hours…. I’ve been told that I passed several critical events during the days I was kept asleep.

Of course the obvious positive is that they saved my life, but there is so much more to it. Going to college and learning to be a paramedic or a doctor or nurse and receiving a degree to hang on one’s wall is not the complete picture. To do it with compassion and skill in a swift manner is far beyond what I can describe or write about here….. Everyone takes emergency professionals for granted until they need them…. From the moment the attack hit me, I knew without a doubt that everyone else was doing all they could… Therefore, I had complete trust, which took my fear away.

I have since been able to meet almost all of the people who was involved in my event that night and have been able to thank them in person. I certainly have a greater appreciation of those who are on stand by to save others, but more than that I have a sense of relief in knowing that they are here if ever needed again. Hat’s off to each of them…..had they not done their job in the way they did it, I would not be here to write about it.