First time, he comes home from mountain biking saying he took a good spill and cracked his helmet. He wants to take a nap. I take him to the ER instead. Thankfully, it is just a minor concussion, but it scared the shit out of me, especially when he said he just wanted to lie down and go to sleep, isn’t that a red flag for head injury?
Second time, he has an allergic reaction to something and I pull out the epi-pen and call 911. Thankfully, they get there pretty quick and get the 02 on him and give him some more drugs. I have never seen someone turn completely purple like that before.
When I was eighteen, an online friend of mine–a couple of years younger than me–who was staying in a hotel with her parents, told me that she had taken a bunch of pills all at once, and intended to kill herself. Another online friend of mine and I managed to track down the hotel, contact the local authorities, and get an ambulance there.
She was really, really pissed with me, after the emergency charcoal drink, the ER, and the mandatory 72-hour stay. But she was alive. We’re still friends, but we don’t talk about this. Ever.
I think my cousin would have died had I not been at an incident when she was kid trapped underwater under a canoe in a rapids. The panicked parents were trying to move the canoe which water pressure had pinned against the rocks sideways in the river. I had said that this was not a ride for her to go on before we even left to go there.
I once did some volunteer work that resulted in my client being granted political asylum. She said that she was certain that if she was deported back to Burma, that she’d be taken away, tortured, and killed the minute she stepped off the plane. It was months of working to gain her trust so she could tell me all the horrible things that had happened to her and her friends so we could build her case, and months doing research and gathering documentation.
I also instinctively grabbed a friend and pulled her into a bar when we suddenly were in the middle of a shoot out on 6th Street in Austin.
In work similar to that of panache45, I have spent many evenings over the years talking to total strangers on a suicide hotline.
When I first started, some years ago, a woman called one night and explained very calmly how she was going to take her life the next morning after her husband left for work. We were on the phone for well over an hour.
Every year or so I pick up the phone to hear her familiar voice and we have a nice talk. She occasionally leaves messages for me with the other phone workers.
Normally, we have no clue what eventually happens to callers. That’s just the nature of the business.
I’m pretty sure I saved my DS from drowning for about 5 years in a row. He loves water and I still spend summers trying to ‘waterproof’ him, but he still can’t swim well at 11.
I also think I saved my niece when she was about 5 years old. She had rolled up in the comforter on her parents bed, but then rolled off the bed and got jammed between the bed and the wall. The bed was just a box spring and a mattress on the floor- no frame. I thought I heard a strange sound and went to investigate. When I released her she was really, really hot and red. She was very tightly rolled up and wedged, and I’m somewhat sure she would have suffocated if she had been left there for a while.
I’m a nurse, too, so have some hospital stories, but I don’t think they count here.
I might have saved, or helped at least, the life of one of my patients. I work in ophthalmology so that’s not exactly a common thing.
He hadn’t come in for his appointments, so I kept calling him. He also had a serious health problem, so I called his other doctor, and she hadn’t seen him for a while, and had been calling as well. Finally he answered the phone one day. He’d been severely depressed, and answered this time for whatever reason, maybe I said the right thing, maybe his guilt (which he told me about) over not talking to his health care providers got to him that day. He cried on the phone, he told me about the troubles in his life, and I listened. I said what I could, I told him that we cared about him, I asked him to please come in to see his other doctor, that she was concerned about him. He told me he would, and that I could talk to her about the conversation, so after we got off the phone, I called the other doctor and filled her in, and asked if she could try to direct him to any assistance resources, because she would have more of that sort of thing.
Since then, I’ve seen him at his appointments, and his mood has improved over time - he’s usually very friendly and lively, and I could see him going back to that with time. It sounds like he’s worked his way out of those short-term big troubles, and though he still struggles with his medical issues, he’s at least still here.
When I was in the Army, my platoon was in Panama for a joint training exercise. I helped evac a casualty in the middle of a jungle because I just happened to be driving by at the time.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever saved a life or not. But maybe I have, twice.
I was whitewater rafting with my niece when she popped out of the raft. I remembered the emergency training that we had just an hour before and pulled her back in. The entire time, my brother was telling me to stop goofing around and start paddling.
Last year I picked a girl up off the street after she fell down. My first thought was that I’d ask her if she was OK and then go on my merry way. It soon became clear that someone in her state of inebriation wouldn’t have much of a life expectancy out on a city street on a cold January night. I convinced some people to call 911 and stayed with her until the cops arrived, probably a good 45 minutes. The last I saw, she was being loaded into the back of an ambulance. She was pretty beligerant about it, too.
Years ago, I made the very stupid decision to hike to a well known waterfall, where people liked to swim during the summer in San Diego in an area called Ramona at the hottest part of the summer. The hike to the falls is very steep and the temperature that day was about 105 with almost no shade. About half way down, I felt myself starting to get heat stroke, but I had plenty of water. So I let the rest of the group go, and I sat in the tiny bit of shade, so I could calm down and slowly make my way back to the car, since I had driven separately.
I worked my way back up the canyon when I saw another guy at the bottom of the canyon starting back up as well. I didn’t realize until he had almost caught up to me that he was beet red and had no water with him! He was almost incoherent by the time we were at the same point on the mountain. I made him sit down and drink plenty of water, then took him to get some food and water when we got to my car. He was eternally grateful and never would have made it without me. Worse than that, he didn’t even have an exit strategy as his friends had driven him, so he wouldn’t have even had a way to get water when he gotten to the top of the canyon.
I was calmly walking down the sidewalk one day when a guy suddenly lurched into rush hour traffic and started having a seizure right in the middle of the road.
I went out in the street and started directing traffic around him. I wasn’t thinking about myself at the time. All I remember is three groups of cars totally 13 went by, and I noticed someone on the other side had pulled over and was using her cell phone.
The 13th car, a big SUV, stopped in front of me, put on the emergency lights, and the driver got out and told me to get out of the road before I got killed.
A client of mine (a mentally disabled fellow) hadn’t answered my calls for a couple of days, so I went to check on him. I knocked on the door - no answer. I peered through the window and there he was, on the floor in his pajamas, ashen-faced, glassy-eyed and breathing shallowly. It was the middle of winter, and he was notorious for keeping his thermostat at about 50 degrees because he was a miser. I pried open the window, climbed through, saw that he was unresponsive, called 911 and stayed there until the ambulance arrived.
Every single day that I control my tendency towards road rage.
Seriously though, who knows? I hope my training soldiers in the Army saved some of their lives. Also, actions under fire might have saved some, at least mine.
2 heimlichs, 1 CPR, 1 staunched bleeding and 1 disarming and stopping of a guy who was about to stab another guy. The last one was back when I was working as a bouncer.
Indirect stuff aside (I’m not going to trot out that stupid quasi-religious email everyone’s gotten about the student who’s nice to another student and prevents a suicide), not really. I’ve been involved in getting people who’ve ODed or attempted suicide to the hospital, but was never the person who called the paramedics (in one instance my friend can take full credit – she knew a mutual friend better than I did and sensed something was up when he didn’t answer his phone. Turns out he’d slit his wrists. We had to break his window).
Wait, I did once grab a girl of about ten before she went over some rapids. We’d just been informed about people who’d died there or broken bones after tumbling over. But a friend of mine actually did end up tripping and going over and came out unscathed. She was a dive champ, but that pretty much meant nothing to the undertow.
He wasn’t unconsciious. I was standing talking to a neighbor while his daughter kept tugging at his leg. He kept telling her not to interrupt. When she finalyy got to speak, she told us that my son fell in the pool. He was about 4 at the time. He’s 34 now. I found him on his back on the bottom of a 4 foot above ground pool. I reached in and grabbed him by his shirt and pulled him out. Choking but very much alive and very scared.
Tried a couple times. When a heart stops from traumatic arrest, it tends to stay stopped. (note, I am neither a nurse nor a Carmen, I am a male computer geek)
When I was 12 or 13 a good friend of mine told me over instant messaging that she was probably going to kill herself that evening. Following my mother’s advice, I called her house and told her to come over and we would watch a movie. She later told me that I saved her life. I don’t know if that’s really true, because she was very dramatic at times, but, well, that is my story.
