Say you’re walking down a busy street one day and get hit by a truck. You’re unconscious but a kind passer-by calls an ambulance for you.
You get taken to hospital, but are still unconscious. Does the hospital check your records to see if there is a number for the next of kin? Do they wait for you to wake up? Or do they go through your phone?
People used to keep a contact for emergency name and phone number in their wallets. Do the younger people do this?
No, they keep it in their cell phone under ICE: In Case of Emergency.
I know a man, professor of math at U. Waterloo, who was hit by a car in Vegas while out for a walk and not carrying his wallet. He was in a coma for months and the hospital could not find out anything about him, even his hotel. Eventually, he woke up and they could ask him. He recovered, but not completely and is still both mentally and physically handicapped, although I doubt that the lack of identity had anything to do with it. He lived alone and no one knew where he had gone. If anyone had known where he had gone, I imagine they could have enlisted the local police to find him. If they could take time from their hunt for undocumented aliens (which I guess he was after three months, come to think of it).
They don’t do both?
Not everyone, no.
If you arrive at a hospital unconscious and remain that way for significant time they’ll have someone go through your pockets/purse/bag looking for clues to your identity and/or contact numbers. If they find something they’ll go with it. If they don’t… well, every now and then on the news you’ll see a short bit where the talking heads say “authorities are trying to determine the identify of this John Doe” followed by a description and a number to call if you think you might know the person.
I’m sure with a basic driver’s license that shows your home address they follow some routine steps. Go to your home address and knock on the door. No one home ask the neighbors. If they don’t know much maybe they could say where he works. Go to his work and they probably have contact info for him.
I don’t do either. However my wallet contains my driver’s license, credit card, etc. etc… Wouldn’t be too difficult to figure out who to call.
And most people’s cell phones have entries like “Mom” or “Work”.
They defintely do not know who to call in all cases, and I have a poignant story from my own family that shows this.
Years ago my grandmother, who lived in our house, was walking to the supermarket by herself. When she was crossing a street she was hit by a car and knocked unconscious. The ambulance took her to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead. None of the rest of us knew about this.
My mother was starting to wonder what on earth was taking my grandmother so long to return from the supermarket, so after many hours, she finally started calling all the hospitals around. Finally got to the one she had been taken. The clerk said, “Oh, Mrs. ___? She’s deceased.”
You can imagine the shock.
That worked for me when I lost one once.
A year or two ago, a Doper (I can’t remember who) told a story of how she went on a date with some guy she met online. She had a good time with him then said goodbye. Several hours later, she got a call from a hospital. Apparently the guy got into a nasty drunken accident. The only number he had on him was hers. The hospital took that as the only identifying information he had, so that’s who they called.
A number of people responded “That’s so creepy! Why would he be walking around with the number of a woman he just met instead of his next of kin?”
Pretty obvious, really. He had it in case he was running late, so he could call her. What else would he do, call his mom? And when he went out afterwards, he didn’t just throw her number in the trash somewhere.
But it was a good reminder of why we should always have an ICE number on us.
I know this isn’t exactly serious but I found a guy’s mobile on a train once. I texted the top three numbers in his ‘sent’ folder asking them if they recognised the number and if they knew how to contact the owner other than by mobile.
The guy had his phone back by lunchtime, and I had a case of wine as a thank you!
I wear a navy issue medical dogtag. My name, mrArus name, my social, his social, my blood type and diabetic/penicillin allergy. It is bright red.
I was once hit by a car while I was riding my bike and the EMT’s found me on the side of the road just as I was regaining consciousness. I was able to verbally provide contact information (after a few false starts - I had a bit of retrograde amnesia and I’d just got married 8 weeks prior to the accident). The EMT’s had removed the storage sack from my bike and were searching through it for ID when I finally popped out my name and husband’s phone number.
Right after this, I heard about a woman who had a similar but worse accident - she remained unconscious for some time - and she had no ID, had just moved to the area and they couldn’t notify her family for months. She turned out to have my same last name, so with that and the similar circumstances, I really identified (heh) with her.
Now whenever I leave the house without my wallet and cell phone I wear a bright red ID bracelet with my name, age, emergency contact, NKDA (no known drug allergies) and home town, state and country.
I don’t have a next of kin so whoever found me dead would just look at my State ID and go back to my flat and find my landlord would say “Mark, no next of kin.”
And that’d be that.
When I worked in the ER (I was in reception and answered phoned) in a case where a preson was brought in the cops long looked at his wallet before he ever got to the hospital
I have a Casio calculator watch that includes a “data bank,” in which I’ve stored my contact phone numbers. For various reasons I wear this watch only while traveling. I don’t travel to any third world countries, but even still, I wonder whether if anything happened to me, they’d think to look in my watch.
Even if I didn’t have other IDs, due to several non-criminal reasons my fingerprints are in numerous databases, so I’ll wager someone could run them and find out who I was pretty quickly.
If in the car, I’d have my wallet, but the last couple of years I’ve gotten into the habit of writing my name, my husband’s name, and phone numbers on a piece of paper and putting it into my pocket if I go for a run or ride.
The hospital in the town where I live has two emergency contacts (my in-laws and my parents) on file. I’m in Ontario.
Chances are, if I have an accident out of town, somebody else is probably with me. Other than that, I always have my wallet.