One day, many years ago, I was as frightened as I’ve ever been. Cailan, my son, his mom, my wife at the time, and I were on vacation in Arizona. We were making our way up a snowy, curving mountain road. A pick-up truck, coming down the road much too fast, failed to make a turn and collided with us head-on. I looked to the back; Cailan was unharmed. I asked his mom how she was; she didn’t answer, just stared straight ahead. I shook her, she didn’t respond. Then I realized, to my horror, she wasn’t breathing. I checked. No pulse.
Strapped into the driver’s seat as I was, I delivered the best punch I could to her chest. Then I did an awkward mouth-to-mouth. Nothing. She had an injury called commotio cordis. A sudden, severe blunt trauma to the chest literally stops the heart. Cailan screamed, “Hit her again, Dad!” I did; nothing.
More mouth-to-mouth. No response. I hit her the third time, she gasped, and began to breath. “What happened? And why does my chest hurt?”
We were taken to a local hospital where x-rays revealed a broken sternum, but no heart damage.
But CPR, in the hands of the overly enthusiastic, can be misused.
While an intern, in our group was a young man who was, shall we say, therapeutically very aggressive. I was walking by a patient’s door one day. A Code Blue, or cardiac arrest call, went over the loud speaker. The arrest was in the room I now stood in front of! I grabbed the handle to enter and see if I could help, when this self-same young intern nearly ran me down. Without pause, he jumped onto the bed, kneeling, raised his fist above the chest of the unconscious man, and delivered a soul-shocking punch. It worked!
The man grabbed his chest and screamed in pain [?!]
The complete story emerged: the man had been sleeping; one of his EKG monitoring leads came undone giving a false alarm which the nurse responded to by calling Code Blue all over the hospital. She didn’t check the patient. Young doctor Kildare came roaring curatively forth and did his fist-thing. He didn’t check the patient.
I concluded, you can learn a lot by thinking before you act, but that may just be me.
There is a ‘PS’ to this story. PS: The patient had had a cardiac bypass the day before, you know the one where they cut you down the middle of the chest?
Man! That punch had to hurt!
