Emergency Room Series - Tomorrow Is Not Assured...

If only we had the power to see and change the future, so many things would be avoided but we don’t have such power so we live our lives believing that all would be alright. We seem to have faith in things working out right all the time but in certain times, life has its way of proving the other way.

A man was brought in by the helicopter paramedics to the emergency room. We had already received the call before he came so we got the resuscitation unit ready to receive him, he came in with a flat line, which means his heart had stopped. 

While they got him off the helicopter and rushed him to the resuscitation unit, the paramedics continued CPR on him. He was rushed in and was transferred to the stretcher. The cardiac arrest team was on standby and intervened, so many of us in the room doing our roles to save this man’s life.

 We had to seek the help of Lucas, which is a robot like device that performs CPR when mounted on someone’s chest, giving the exact and accurate rate and depth of compression needed to restart the heart, we were told the paramedics had been performing CPR for over 40 minutes when they picked him up and transported him to the ER.

Now, this man’s story moved me, he was said to be on a ship cruise with his family. He was a swimmer. He and a friend of his, who is also a very experienced swimmer were diving in deep waters. I think they were also into ocean research or something like that. They were said to have gotten dressed in the ship with all their gadgets, cameras, oxygen tanks on their back and other stuffs and they dived in to the bottom of the sea. 

They were said to be on the sea floor for a few minutes then something went horribly wrong, the oxygen tanks malfunctioned! They were cut off air, his friend tried to signal to him that there was something wrong and began to swim upwards back to the surface, his friend was said to be lighter in body weight unlike the patient who was a bit bulkier so it was slower for him to swim, there was no oxygen to his brain and his heart stopped and he went into cardiac arrest. 

His friend was able to get to the surface and signal for help from those on the ship who called the ambulance, they were not close to land so the helicopter went instead.

This was someone who looked in his mid forties and wanted to have a good time with the family and do what he enjoys doing.

For the next 40 minutes, everyone did all they could, CPR continued, jabs of adrenaline, oxygen, tracheostomy, suctioning, chest drain, everything to get the water out of his lungs and to restart his heart, nothing seemed to work.

His heart had restarted once but stopped again.

After about almost 2hrs of painstaking resuscitation, he was pronounced dead.

Then the plenty paper works and calls began, we had to call the police, coroner and others because of the complexity of the case. I had never thought that it was possible for oxygen to go off like that, it wasn’t that the oxygen got exhausted in the tanks but a connection problem. I wondered why it was when they got to the bottom it happened, and for both? that’s really strange!

His friend was also rushed to another hospital. His friend was said to have swam to the surface too fast and caused something to go wrong with the lungs, it had to do with sudden gravity, so I was told.

I can’t imagine the horror the patient’s family would go through when they’re told what had happened to their father or husband. They couldn’t come to the hospital with him. It was so sad and painful because he was still young and circumstances could most likely have been avoidable, maybe someone overlooked something. I hope they investigate what went wrong exactly.

Life is indeed a mystery and we can only hope and pray that only good things come our way.