Yesterday, my grandmother was having what we all thought was a heart attack. Instead of calling an emergency number, I decided to drive her as the best hospital in the territory was literally two minutes drive away from her house while an ambulance would take probably several minutes to get there. However, on reflection I thought perhaps that was a bad idea, the medics in an ambulance certainly have a lot more training and equipment to deal with it than what I had; which was three soluble asprins and a lead foot on the accelerator,
What would you do. Would you wait or would you get them there.
I think you did the right thing for the reasons you stated. An ambulance would have taken a lot longer. You actually got her better treatment, faster.
And for some reason, when you call 911 with a medical emergency they always send a fire truck, too, which you have to pay for although they’ve never contributed a thing whenever we’ve had to call.
Hope your grandmother is doing better and enjoys a bright Christmas.
Same as you. The question is whether you can get her to A&E quicker than the para-medic get to you - without making her condition worse. I doubt the response time from calling the emergeny number is going to be less than - say - 5 minutes so if you can get her in the car and to the hospital in 4 it makes sense.
If you’re in the US, you don’t pay for the fire truck. The people on the fire truck are well trained medical personal. Maybe they didn’t have to do anything to help you, that doesn’t mean they never help. When pre-hospital personell are called to a home, they have no idea what they’re walking into. A simple heart attack could be a 400 lb guy that takes 4 guys to lift.
In every state I’ve worked, if the medic unit feels the patient is critical enough they transport and there is no charge. Otherwise, they call a private ambulance service to transport. That you, or your insurance will be billed for.
The fire truck and the medic unit will stablize the patient before they are transported, so their chances of surviving the ride are much better than in your car.
There are times driving to the ER is perfectly acceptable, but not for heart attack or stroke. Even if you only live 2 minutes from the hospital, it takes time to get the patient into and out of the car. Time is critical with any cardiac event.
A baby at my house went into convulsions once. We lived just down the road from the hospital. His mother was panicking so I rang 000. The ambulance was quick, but not as quick as just jumping in the car. But youd have to put him in a car seat and what if he chokes, or hurts himself. The ambulance people knew exactly what to do both for him and his mother.
If the patient is upright and conscious, Id be tempted to drive them. If they have passed out, then the ambulance can transport them more safely, and give emergency treatment as well.
I did not know that (seemingly) you have to pay for a fire truck or ambulance in the US. If that’s true, how much does a call-out typically cost? Are the emergency services paid for by a combination of taxation and charges for call-outs, or by call-out fees alone?
We pay for our fire and ambulance service in the UK indirectly through taxation and call-outs are free, so I guess in some respects your way is fairer as you don’t pay if you don’t use the service.
The US has more than 30,000 fire departments. Sweeping claims about their billing practices are probably wrong.
My city’s public fire department charges at least $400 per transport, just for the ambulance moving from A to B. The medical care costs extra. You can have a $600 bill before you see the inside of a hospital.
There’s no such thing as “the US” as far as emergency services go. That’s something that varies at a very local level. There are single counties that have more independent fire or police departments than exist in all of Britain.
Thirty years ago, on the night before Easter, my father began experiencing a heart attack. My mother is an RN, she threw a robe on him and drove him to the hospital, which was halfway across town. She said later she didn’t pay a lot of attention to stoplights.
There was a history of heart trouble in my dad’s family. His own father had died of a heart attack, and his brother needed surgery but wouldn’t get it. So mom figured the time it would take an ambulance to arrive would be better spent driving. I stayed behind, called the ER, and let them know he was on the way, giving particulars of age, health history, and so on. I was calm because I didn’t know how bad off he was.
Turns out, in his case anyway, that it was a good thing mom got him there so fast. He even had another episode that afternoon, on Easter Sunday, when a code blue was called on him. Dad said "I woke up and a nurse was beating on my chest, yelling at me ‘Wake up Harold! Wake up Harold!’ " Dad later said if he had died it couldn’t have been on a better day.
So in our case, given the position of the hospital, Dad’s family history, my mother’s ability to know what was happening, and me at home to call in an alert, it was best for the drive. But different circumstances make for different decisions.
The only difference I can think of is, when taken by ambulance the patient is rushed into a room immediately. When they come in by car, they have to go through the front desk and maybe wait longer to be seen.
When my youngest son was about 5 weeks old, he had bronchiolitis and was coughing uncontrollably, so much that he was throwing up. I took him to the pediatrician (a block from our house) and she advised getting him to the ER. She thought we could drive him faster, but advised that someone who knows infant CPR should sit in the back and hold him instead of putting him in the car seat (which squishes them down and can cause further respiratory distress). My husband sat with him and we drove. It was a bit harrowing. This ended up being the first of three rushes to the ER with him with the same issue within his first 7 months of life. He’s 6 1/2 now and fine!
Yeah, my concern with driving my Grandma to the hospital when she might be having a heart attack is what happens if she needs CPR. If you’re driving, you can’t do CPR - and even if you have another passenger with you and they’re with Granny in the back seat, I’d guess that doing adequate CPR in the back of a car isn’t possible. If you’re at home you might have to wait a few minutes for the ambulance, but at least you can be doing CPR until they get there. Early defibrillation is important, but the CPR before that is beneficial as well.
So it’s possible the scenario could end up being:[ul][li]Granny gets into the car with you and pretty quickly her heart stops. It’s only two minutes to the hospital, but it’s probably more like three or four minutes at least before she could get a code team working on her (pull up to the hospital, find out where exactly to take her, get an unconscious person out of the car, wheel her inside, start treatment, etc…). So let’s say she might be without a heartbeat and oxygen for four minutes.[/li][li]Or an ambulance crew takes three minutes to get to your house. Granny’s heart stopped right after you called the ambulance, and you can do effective CPR on her for three minutes until the EMTs arrive. It takes another minute or so for them to get out the defibrillator, but they can also help with CPR and start other treatment as well.[/ul][/li]This is just a WAG on my part, but I think the second scenario would be better. In both cases it might be four minutes from when her heart stops to when she gets a defibrillator, but if she can get CPR in the meantime then her chance of a better outcome goes up somewhat (since CPR means the body is still getting some oxygen circulation).
It was not a heart attack and they even sent her home after 10 hours and about 3000 tests. They do think it has something to do with her chest, most probably her lungs are quite weak. We see a specialist on Monday.
Out of curiosity, I once asked my employer-provided insurance carrier about ambulances. The representative told me that ambulances are only covered if I was in immediate danger of dying. If not, like if I broke a leg or something (note that a broken leg [i[can* be life-threatening), I should call a cab and they’d pay for that.
I would have called the ambulance. Drivers are mostly inattentive, selfish douchebags; it’s easy for a two-minute drive to turn into a ten-minute drive. And what if you get pulled over? But an ambulance can just speed past everyone.
You’re right. I was told by the EMS director when I was working in a mid-size city that every year they had at least one emergency call where someone with chest pain who was trying to drive to the hospital in a private vehicle had died in the car on the way there. He felt very strongly that it was better to call 911 and wait for the EMTs, and I agree.
You don’t want to end up on the side of the road with your family member in cardiac arrest, frantically trying to tell 911 where your car is and then trying to find a way to perform CPR inside a car (which probably isn’t going to go well - both because of how hard it would be ot position someone properly for CPR from being seated in a car, as well as having wasted precious time when you should have been doing CPR calling 911 to help them find you on the side of the road).
Plus, of course, ambulances aren’t expected to wait for red lights. You could end up in a car accident while trying to rush to the hospital, and that could waste even more precious time.
While thankfully in this situation nothing bad happened, I think in the vast majority of situations it’s less risky to call 911 from home and wait for them to come to you. If the person is stable enough to drive to the hospital on your own, a few minutes waiting for EMTs won’t make or break the situation. If the person is very unstable, the EMTs are far better equipped to handle any emergency that happens on the way to the hospital than a layperson in a normal car is.
You could end up in a car accident while trying to rush to the hospital, and that could waste even more precious time.