How long after an accident do you get pain meds?

I had a near miss sitting at a light today, which got me to wondering about the aftermath. Legs turned into a pretzel, broken jaw, and a sharp, stabbing pain in my side that I can’t describe because my neck won’t move.

First, I need to wait for the ambulance … ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow!

Ah, the ambulance is finally here. Do paramedics carry any kind of heavy-duty pain reliever? Can they do anything? How long after pulling me out of the car can they do something—i.e. what are they checking for before it’s okay to give me something. Or does it just depend on how loudly I’m screaming and whether their ears hurt?

Or do I have to wait until the emergency room doctor signs off? What does she check for?

So, am I looking at fifteen minutes of agony or an hour and a half?

ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow!

I don’t know about paramedics at a car accident, but I broke my shoulder recently (three fractures to the humerus joint). It was about an hour and a half from the time of the accident till well after being in the ER for xrays and scans before I was offered a percoset.

I had a very serious accident in 1999 and was administered pain medication during med flight. Oddly I wasn’t in that much pain (that I remember) despite have punctured lungs, broken ribs, cracked sternum, two broken ankles and so on.

After talking to several paramedic pals and doctors afterwards I was told that in my case the medication administered had a bonus side effect of reducing my memory of the event. They referred to it as “milk of amnesia” - a fitting name.

Looking forward to other posts by professionals on the subject.

A few years ago I had taken my children to the playground. My son fell off the monkey bars and the second he stood up I knew his arm was broken. I figured, okay, Childrens Hospital is like six blocks away. Get everyone in the car and speed to the ER. After going through the parking production and triage I assumed they would give him some pain meds. Wrong. Well, in typical Mom fashion, I got really impatient, the arm was clearly broken, whole ones don’t bend that way! And my baby was crying his eyes out, WTF!!

The nurse told me that although I almost certainly got to the hospital faster than an ambulance could have picked him up, it would have been better to wait for them. Apparently, they have, and are authorized to administer, morphine on the ambulance. In the ER, we had to go through triage, wait for the doctor to see him, order the medicine, wait for it to be delivered from the hospital pharmacy, and finally wait for a nurse to administer it. Altogether it was @ 40 minutes from the time I walked in the door till he got medicine for the pain.

In the future, I will be sure to call the ambulance.

In the future, I’ll leave the hospital, cross the street, and make a quick phone call. No, wait, I’ll call as I’m leaving.

If it’s any consolation, many people injured in car accidents don’t feel it for some time. My wife is a police volunteer and she and an officer were trading stories back and forth while I listened. In one story, an officer had to keep telling some man to sit down because he had a broken hip and the paramedics didn’t need him to come to them. He was shaking, dazed and clearly in shock, but was apparently not feeling the least bit of pain.

I was run down on my motorcycle by a hit-and-run driver at 5pm in Atlanta.
An ambulance was there soonish, and transported me to the [del]seventh circle of Hell[/del] Grady Memorial Hospital.

With 8 broken ribs, a punctured lung, torn liver, and broken legs, I was in some pain.
Every breath I took was only taken in order to scream in ungodly pain and agony, yet we stopped at red lights and drove slowly. When I asked -in some impolite manner, I’m sure - WTF? I was told that running lights and sirens increased our accident possibility by 300%, and just be patient. Of course, my begging for pain meds was ignored.

I didn’t get pain meds until approximately 2 hours after my impact.

When I arrive at the ER for my annual kidney stone painfest, it’s usually 45 minutes to an hour before meds get on board. I now keep extras on hand always, and take some before driving to the ER.

YMMV.

Well, for one, I think only MD’s can prescribe such meds. And then that there is they don’t know the stranger rolled into their ER (history, allergies, if they are intoxicated already, etc.) And they don’t know yet if the patient is headed to surgery.

Not bad protocol all in all.

P.S. Report that you are allergic to Tramadol. If you are in agony it won’t work.

When I broke my arm as a kid, I didn’t receive any pain meds until I was in the examination room, after x-rays were taken. There may not have been anything until they gave me the injected medication used during setting the broken bone. However, I wasn’t crying, so that may have tempered their response.

Almost ten years ago now, I broke my right humerus in a stupid(very) riding accident at my parents’ farm. My mom had some hydrocodone, sorry can’t remember the strength. I know I took two. By the time we got to the hospital, about an hour and a half away, I was in very little pain. I was pretty convinced that I had just sprained my shoulder and I think I had nearly convinced my mom. They did very little for me in the ER, just gave me a sling and maybe some more pain meds(can’t remember) and directed me to see an orthopedist the next morning to get my cast put on. So I did.

When I went to the ER in an ambulance with a kidney stone, I didn’t get any pain relief from the paramedics. It hurt so bad I was vomiting (not nausea, just from the pain)–it felt like somebody was stabbing me with an aluminum-foil-covered dagger in the left flank. They just held up a plastic thingy for me to puke in. I got an IV with intravenous pain meds as soon as I got to the hospital (and a nicer thingy to puke in) plus a vicodin scrip to take with me.

I got hit by a car about 15 years ago, and was transported to the hospital by ambulance. Didn’t get anything for pain in the ambulance, and once they took xrays and found nothing broken at the hospital, they just stuck me in the corner and forgot about me. I had to cry for them to even notice that I was still there and in pain.

Would I be right to assume that it depends on the hospital and/or EMS system? Any pain medication will be prescribed by a doctor, and I would assume that the emergency room physician or the operating surgeon will make an assessment before deciding the appropriate pain treatment. It was decades ago, but I did not receive any pain meds in the seven hours between having a femur broken by a truck and entering surgery (The orthopedic surgeon on duty had a reputation, and we requested another who had to get out of bed.)

When my daughter broke her leg playing softball in high school, we called the ambulance. While enroute the paramedic was on the phone to the ER doc. I remember him saying things like “OBVIOUS deformity of lower leg” and “considerable pain.” She got morphine by injection within 5 minutes of being loaded by the amblance personnel. Sometimes, it depends on your EMTs/Paramedics, and their relationship with the ER doc.

When I shattered my left tibia and fibula, it was hours before I got any pain meds. My understanding is that they didn’t want to give me anything until they knew whether I was going to have surgery right away (I didn’t). Of course the fact that it was the Friday after Thanksgiving and they had to scrounge up an orthopedic surgeon first might have had something to do with it.

I fell while cycling about a month ago and broke my collarbone. I lay on the sidewalk for about five minutes before the ambulance showed up (I was downtown so the station was a block away). Once they got me in the ambulance, they offered me IV Fentanyl because otherwise “the bumpy ride would be painful”. I accepted. Once I got to the ER, it was maybe 15 minutes before they offered me IV Dilaudid. I stayed in the ER for maybe two hours. They gave me 2 x 7.5mg oxycodone pills on my way out.

That was my first ambulance ride and ER visit. I’m fairly young, otherwise healthy, and told them repeatedly I had a high pain tolerance. I have no idea how normal my experience was, although I can tell you from the time they gave me the Fentanyl in the ambulance, I didn’t feel shit.

EMS systems vary from town-to-town, so there really isn’t one answer for this. That said, administering pain medications is part of the standard paramedic curriculum and I’ve never heard of an Advanced Life Support (has paramedics), 911-ambulance that doesn’t carry some type of pain medication.

Few, if any, Basic Life Support (has EMT-basics only) ambulances carry any sort of pain medications. I don’t know of any that do, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some out there.

Where I work, an ambulance with paramedics responds to every 911 call. We carry Morphine Sulfate and Fentanyl Citrate. I use the Fentanyl a lot more often because it has fewer side effects and a faster onset.

St. Urho
Paramedic

I think part of the issue is the ER doctors need to know about your pain in order to perform their diagnoses. If they give you effective pain medication at the accident scene and then transport you to the hospital, the doctors there might miss some trauma because you wouldn’t be feeling it anymore. They need to know things like your neck hurts in order to figure out where your injuries are. They also need to know what injuries have a suspicious lack of pain. If you come into the ER with serious injuries but you’re not in pain, they’ll be looking for nerve damage. Pain medication would conceal all this and delay treatment.

Nemo. That’s not true and I would consider it cruel to withhold pain medication for that reason. My medical director would, too.

That used to be a standard of abdominal pain management, but research showed it had no actual validity. From here

I’m not a medical professional but the practice still apparently exists in some hospitals. I was taken in to an ER in 2008 for abdominal pains and was told I couldn’t have any pain medication until the diagnosis was done for the reasons I gave. And my father was taken in to the ER for abdominal pains just a few months ago and was told the same thing.