Stayin' Alive

So I'm not a frequent blogger but today was an experience. As part of my residency, I work with Life Flight. There is a 3 person crew comprosed of the Pilot, a Flight Nurse and the Flight Physician. We transport critical patients from one hospital to another, or from accident scenes to a trauma center. It's a lot of fun (not necessarily for the patients, though). It is pretty cramped quarters. Then, depending on the size of the patient, space gets even tighter.

Well, we got called out to transport a woman having a heart attack. When we arrived at the ER, she was no longer responding. I put a breathing tube in her and we got her ready to transport. When we left, she was on an IV to keep her blood pressure and pulse up as they were both low. As we were loading her into the helecopter her pulse began to drop in spite of the IV. We increased the medication and her pulse improved. About 1-2 minutes into a 15 minute flight, we lost her pulses.

I was sitting in the co-pilot seat with the seat turned around at the patient's head managing her breathing. The flight nurse started CPR but due to the pathent's size and stiff chest, she was not able to generate anough force to do good compressions. So, she took over the ventilations and I did CPR WWE style, with an elbow from the front of the aircraft. I did it for the remainder of the flight. Once we landed, there was another group to help out however, no one was doing CPR, so I climbed on top and did it while the rolled the gurney into the hospital and to the ER. Yes, It was like on TV.

After we got to the ER, the ER folks took over. I was quite winded. If you've done CPR before, you know 2-3 minutes is a long time to do it. I got to do it for about 15-20. Then it got interesting.....

I noticed that I was breathing kind of hard. Then I started feeling a warm buzzing in my ears. I thought, "I should sit down," so I did. But the buzzing got denser. People were commenting that I did not look too good. I just smiled and said, "I'm going down". The next thing I knew, I was waking up with someone holding my feet up and a crowd around me. One of our kind residents apparently supported my head when I went out to keep me from falling out of my chair and becoming a trauma. When I came to, I was saying, "I'm OK," but they weren't convinced. They registered me and plugged me into an IV. My EKG was fine. Just overheated. I recovered and went back to work in about an hour. I actually had to file it as a workman's comp claim.

It was kind of nice to be doted on by the nurses. I received much attention and wellwishes. Everyone was very concerned and I received excellent care. One of the attendings even reminded me that there was an age limit on flyers for this very reason. It's great to be respected by your peers......

By the way, CPR should be approximately 100 beats per minute which is the same beats per minute as a particular BeeGee's song......