I received a few great story submissions, thank you! This one is from Dom, a paramedic:

Much is made in the press of cardiac arrest victims that EMS saves in the prehospital field. The recognition is great, and much deserved for the guys who manage to save a patient, but the reality is a bit more stark. Nationally, if you suffer a cardiac arrest outside the hospital, your chance of surviving ranges from 4% to 20%. Your chance of walking out of the hospital neurologically intact is even less. I’ve been a paramedic for 13 years in a high call volume area. Out of the 40 or 50 cardiac arrests I’ve treated over the years, I’ve had exactly two walk out of the hospital as if nothing ever happened. One of those cases really stands out in my head.

We were called to a report of a 35-year-old female with chest pain. 35 year-olds without past medical history aren’t typically at high risk for heart attacks, so we rolled in assuming it was something minor. We saw a very petite woman lying in bed, telling us her chest had been hurting for the last hour. All of her vital signs checked out, nothing was abnormal. Since we couldn’t pinpoint any other cause of the chest pain, we told her we should take her to the hospital for an exam, although we were sure it was “probably nothing.” We started an IV line and gave the patient some nitroglycerin, standard procedures for anyone with chest pain. The nitro failed to reduce the patient’s chest pain. As I’m on the phone to the hospital, I’m telling the ER nurse the patient’s story and telling her what we’ve done. As I wrap up the call I state, “I think this is probably just some pleuritic chest wall pain, Chris, we’ll be there in about 5 minutes…hold on, shit, I think she just coded.”

I was glancing at the patient’s EKG while on the phone and noted her previously normal rhythm suddenly went into what looked like ventricular fibrillation, in other words, cardiac arrest. Initially thinking a wire had come loose, I looked over at my patient, who was doing the “fish out of water” guppy breathing as her eyes rolled back in her head.

Things had suddenly gone terribly, terribly, wrong. Not only had I told this nice woman that this was most likely “nothing,” but I had just embarrassed myself on the phone with the charge nurse by giving her this story about how it was probably “nothing,” only to have the patient crash and burn right in front of me. This was not going to be easy to live down. My pride was going to have to take a back seat for the moment, however. I ripped open the woman’s nightshirt and grabbed the defibrillator paddles. Since I was caught so off guard, I didn’t “grease the paddles,” which increases electrical conduction and reduces skin inflammation and burns. Not only that, but I hadn’t checked to see that the energy level was set at a maximum 360 joules (we usually give initial shocks much lower). I spark her at 360 joules and these little puffs of smoke wisp up off her chest from burning her chest slightly. This was not my day. Like someone flipping a light switch, the woman immediately looked up at me standing over her and said, “What’s going on? Why are you standing over me? Why does my chest burn? What are those in your hands?” Looking at the paddles in my hands, and the two oval red burns on her chest, I put them behind my back with a sheepish look.

“Uh, well, you had a little bit of a spell, and I had to, uh, use some electricity to make you come back around.” The poor woman burst into tears crying, “You told me everything was going to be okay!” Considering how much stress I had just gone through in the last 20 seconds, I nearly burst into tears as well.

I’ve never since had a call where I went from calm to panic to elation to embarrassment so quickly. The bottom line was I had saved a patient, truly saved one, and I knew that was pretty rare. The last I heard about the patient, she had been diagnosed with a rare heart condition and was given an implanted defib. She’s doing fine now.

Ah, I love the happy endings!