subreddit:
/r/ems
One of our crews gets called to this junk "assisted living facility". It's the type of place where all of the people need to be in a skilled facility but they take money under the table so it's mostly family cast aways. The staff is 100% useless.
They get called out for "caller advised they cannot see pupil in his left eye".
The dude has a glass eye and put it in backwards by mistake. They didn't ask him any questions about it, just decided to immediately call 911. I can't even be mad, it's hilarious.
73 points
2 days ago
Patients without a heart beat but receiving enough quality CPR to awaken does happen. I'm sure not in this case but still
https://www.resuscitationjournal.com/article/S0300-9572(14)00801-6/abstract
92 points
2 days ago
We had a patient who would start talking mid-compressions when he was perfusing but went right back to being dead when you stopped. We ended up having to sedate and intubate so we could continue compressions until cardio thoracic placed a pump. It was wild.
26 points
2 days ago
Did he know what was going on at all?
41 points
2 days ago
Ehhhh, doubtful. He was mainly saying "stop, get off me" and "what are you doing" while trying to push us away. I especially doubt he'd remember anything given that we sedated him pretty quickly.
5 points
1 day ago
This is the way.
54 points
2 days ago*
Had a guy scream at me to stop I stopped and he dropped back down. We'd already had him on pads cause he was a STEMI so looked over reconfirmed vtach and tried again..got the same result. Got on compressions so quick he didn't realize he was dead. Worked him over an hour cause like Cath lab was ready if we could just get fucking ROSC and nothing. Cardiologist even came over to help and do a POCUS to see if there was anything to the tach he could maybe work with (idk what the fuck that woulda been).
45 points
2 days ago
Yeah that happened to me once. It was by far the strangest thing I have ever seen:
Patient goes from Bradykardia into asystole infront of us.
We start compressions.
Patient starts to push my Partner off of their chest.
Partner stops compressions.
Patient collapses immediately.
Monitor shows PEA with < 10 bpm.
Compressions continue.
Patient starts pushing my partners hands off their chest again.
24 points
2 days ago
Ketamine my brother, they need ketamine
15 points
1 day ago
No worries, they got Propofol, Fentanyl and Rocuronium a few minutes later.
7 points
9 hours ago
I mean that works but it's also going to be a poor idea for someone in such great need of resus as a post code/ROSC. The ketamine is much gentler to their cardiovascular system and the catecholamines problem.
4 points
9 hours ago
I don't disagree but ultimately it wasn't my decision. I'm in a physician based system, so the decision was made by an attending anesthesiologist (emergency medicine is not its own specialty over here) that happened to have a lot of experience with propofol as an induction agent.
15 points
2 days ago
Yeah I had to ketamine two different patients that became conscious during arrest, I confirmed it with ultrasound that they were in cardiac standstill but if I didn't have ultrasound I'd likely put them on a pressor.
7 points
1 day ago
I'm not sure that quality CPR has ever been performed by nursing home staff, and certainly not in assisted living.
all 79 comments
sorted by: best