The call was for a child. A child down.
We had been enjoying a rather quiet Wednesday; we were bored, looking forward to the arrival of the night crew, when the emergency tones sounded. It was for a child who was having an epileptic-type seizure.
Grabbing our gear, we raced to our rig, jumped in, raced to the scene within a matter of moments. We knew we had to take action if the kid was to have any chance of escaping brain damage due to the severity of the seizure.
The child in question was familiar to some of my partners; as for me, I had never seen him before. He was said to be fourteen years old, yet he looked younger: he looked no more than nine/ten at the most.
The child was also severely disabled: he was dying from muscular dystrophy; he was in a wheelchair most of the time. Pitifully skinny, pale blonde hair that looked white, pale skin, wore gold, round wire-rimmed glasses. Rather handsome; a classic case of "the heartbreak kid". He was all this--and more, I suppose.
The kid's mom met us in the driveway, doing the ambulance dance--you know, waving her arms frantically in the air, yelling loudly, hopping up and down in a panic. She raced to the door of their house, yelling us to follow her.
The kid was lying faceup in the kitchen, on the floor. His entire body was shaking violently in a seizure; his eyes were halfway closed, the pupils rolled back into his head, showing only the whites, his breathing gasping and labored, face a terrifying dark grey-blue color. He looked ghastly. The seizure showed no sign of abating.
Mom told us that Johnny (that was the kid's name) had been in t his state for a good fifteen-twenty minutes or so. At that announcement, my heart sank, for it may have already been too late for this kid: he was possibly brain damaged by now. Not at all encouraging.
"Goose" grabbed an airway, tried to get it down Johnny's throat. No luck, as the kid vomited all over himself. "Goose" quickly rolled Johnny onto his side, cleared the mess from his throat, quickly checked for pulse/breathing. "Goddamn it!" I heard him mutter, "The kid's asystole! CPR, STAT!!"
Whereupon, he started pushing on the kid's chest while I breathed into his mouth, hoping, praying he'd come out of it. Johnny was fading fast; time was of the essence for this young teenaged boy.
***************************************************************
"Goose" and I continued working on Johnny as we whisked him to the ambulance. Once loaded in the back, once the doors had been securely locked, we took off towards Nashville Memorial Hospital, full lights and sirens, laying on the horn, causing cars to scurry out of the way as we screamed past. All the while, we continued our rescue efforts on the young man.
***************************************************************
At the hospital, Johnny was rushed into a cubicle, where the trauma team soon took command. In less than a minute, they got him back. Johnny breathed; the mood instantly lightened up as his vital signs returned. Now, he wasn't out of the woods, but once the powerful anticonvulsant drugs took affect, his chances for survival increased dramatically.
***************************************************************
I don't think I'll never forget the sight of the child's blue face, or the sight of his body shaking like a dog that'd been hit by a car. Even though this happened back in March/April, I still find my sleep interrupted: every time I close my eyes, I still see Johnny's face, still feel the helplnessness of the situation, still remember our team trying to bring him back from the dead in the rear of our ambulance en route to the hospital.
I wonder even now if Johnny made it. I don't know much about him other than the information gleaned at the scene upon our arrival or what we witnessed; he is one of the countless faces we have come across, yet what he put us through that day will probably remain with me for a very long time to come.
~Nico E. Hernandez, EMT, Nashville, Tennessee.
*Note: "flipper" is the term what some paramedics call a person who is having a seizure disorder.
