My experience is as a teacher in a center for special needs preschool/infant clients. We wrote grant after grant to have a nurse on staff, to no avail. Lie student down if possible, protect head, clear room and wait. We were pretty quick to call 911 due to the multiple health issues many of these kids faced.
EMTs seldom arrive within seconds of a call. I’d much rather have to live with the fact that a student was embarrassed by the arrival of unneeded medical help than with the death or lasting injury that could have been prevented with prompt medical attention, and assuming that this is the United States, protecting oneself from liability issues is reason enough to be extra-cautious.
Even someone who regularly has seizures cannot predict with certainty that the next seizure will not require medical attention, and if someone has a seizure in class, I don’t see how the arrival of paramedics escalates the embarrassment of the situation by that much anyway. Other students should be ushered from the room after the help arrives, and since these students are adults, hopefully everyone involved would be mature enough to understand the situation.
I suppose it’ll be pretty obvious once it’s under way, but you may still find it helpful to have some advance idea of what happens. YouTube has plenty of examples:
Warning: there’s a lot of blood in this one because the victim bit his tongue severely:
The last one gives good reason for calling 911 when it starts. I don’t know whether a severe tongue bite can be fatal, but if it’s bad enough that the victim loses a large portion of their tongue because the EMT’s weren’t there in time, that’d be a bad outcome.
Agreed, with one exception. The primary concern is to make sure that the person having the seizure does not injure herself. That might mean interposing yourself between her and a desk, for example, so that she doesn’t bang her head on it. That sort of thing.
Strong suggestion - go take an American Red Cross first aid course and specifically ask the instructor about seizure management. It will be a VERY worthwhile spending of a Saturday.
Not in my jurisdiction. And that may make it easier for me to advocate my preferred position.
But that is a local policy that could vary from place to place.
Anecdote, FWIW, and surely not hard data.
In 7 years of working at 9-1-1 we have had 2 patients die subsequent to status epilepticus (SE). Both had prior seizure history.
In the same time frame we have had about 900 seizure calls. I have no idea how many of those might have been SE cases but survived. The large majority were undoubtedly routine incidents and most probably had prior seizure history.
A research article from the journal Epilepsy Currents notes a mortality rate of about 1 in 40 for seizures lasting 10 to 29 minutes. There is a sharp rise in mortality to 1 in 5 when seizure length exceeds 30 minutes.
With an average ambulance response time locally of about 8 minutes we really do not want patients to reach the ten minute point without receiving treatment. That requires rolling the ambulance well before anyone can be sure it is SE and not a normal seizure.
Thanks. That is one worry off the table, at least in your jurisdiction. I’m not sure how to find out about mine - there must be a dozen ambulance companies in mine, and I’m not sure how 911 dispatch chooses which one to send the call out to or what their policies are. Any tips for finding out?
I appreciate everyone’s responses, but I guess I should’ve clarified that I have a cousin and a friend at church with epilepsy, so I’ve seen seizures before and know what to do when one occurs. We have an Office of Health Services at my community college, so if it happens, I need to notify them first and let them call an ambulance. I’m on the side of “call an ambulance just to be safe even if it embarrasses the student”.
My question was more specific: in the case of a grand mal seizure, should she be left at her desk to risk getting injured herself, or should I get a few students to help me clear the area of desks and move her onto the floor, possibly leading to the injury of one or more of them? I guess it depends on the severity of the seizure - if it’s over fast I could leave her at her desk, and if it lasts longer it’d be better to move her to the floor. I’ll also be sure to carry a wrap or sweater on me so I can ball it up and put it between her head and the floor/desk if necessary. Are there any other classroom concerns you guys can think of?
It is frightening.
Particularly when it happens to your teacher and you’re only 13 years old and have no idea of what’s going on. One morning, she came to class and gave us weird instructions. We didn’t understand what she wanted us to do so we started doing the same exercise we had done the week before. While we were doing this (looking at each other with a puzzled look on our faces), she stood at back of the class, right behind me. My friend looked at her and said “Are you alright?” and boom, she came crashing down under my my chair…
For the record, we did get some help (after some 30 seconds of shocked silence).