Paging Dr. Google

Ohhh, the internet. You gotta love it.

We responded at about 8:30 pm for a 23 year old male having a panic attack. When we arrived at the house the rest of my crew remembered that they had been on this guy before a couple months back.

We found him sitting on the couch complaining of rapid heart rate and some hyperventilation. He did not appear to be in any distress at all. He said he had been practicing the relaxation tips the doctor had told him to use but it wasn't working. He was speaking normally and his pulse was barely over 100. He had no tingling in his hands or chest pain or any other symptom that we would worry about so we really weren't too concerned. Nor were any of his family, as evidenced by the fact that his sister (?) appeared in the hallway, glanced back into the living room, saw a crew of firefighters, turned and went on her way without a word.

Our patient decided that he didn't want to go to the hospital by ambulance after all, because he didn't want to "waste our time". I'm sure we all mentally said, "Too late". So we cancelled the ambulance and he signed out AMA. As we got back on the rig the firefighter said, "He's gonna call us back you know that, right?"

Fast forward eight hours...yes, at just after four in the morning, thank you very much, we got toned out for the same address. When we walked in this time the first words out of his mouth were, "I'm going to the hospital this time." Oh, we already knew that. Again, he was in no apparent distress and in fact his heart rate was in the high 80's and his pressure was fine and his ekg normal.

He, however, had spent his time between our visits cruising the web for information on all the things that could be wrong with him (which probably triggered the second event).

As we waited for the ambulance to arrive he peppered us with questions. Could it be tachycardia? Well, tachycardia just means a heart rate greater than 100 beats per minute and you don't even have that right now. What about palpitations? Well, a palpitation is just a sensation in which a person is aware of an irregular, hard, or rapid heartbeat, which...again...you don't have. And so on.

In defense of his research, he stated that he had a lot of time on his hands, which I took to mean that he was jobless. He also stated at one point that this was his grandmother's house. So, I thought to myself, you're 23 years old with no job and living free at grandmas house.

If that's the case, what are you so stressed about?