I'm Feeling Much Better Now

We responded to a call for a 65 year old male, "conscious, breathing, not alert". This could be a hundred different things but from the dispatch it didn't sound too bad and I wasn't too worried about it. When we arrived the patient's wife said something about a seizure but I didn't quite get the full story because we got busy fast. My captain gathered info from the wife while the firefighter and I assessed the patient. He was sitting up on the couch with his eyes closed and appeared to be barely breathing. Uh-oh.

We laid him down and for a minute it looked like he had stopped breathing entirely and had probably just coded. He had agonal respirations and a carotid pulse (fortunately). My firefighter quickly dropped an OPA into his mouth and I cut open his shirts and put the ECG pads on. The firefighter started bagging our patient and after about three breaths our guy started pushing the OPA out of his mouth and opening his eyes. It was at this point that he looked at my firefighter, shrieked, and took a swing at him. The firefighter grabbed his arm before he made contact and I leaned down on his legs to keep him from kicking.

Now, I've never been in this situation, but I have seen it many times and can pretty much imagine how unbelievably bizarre it must be. Can you imagine having some medical event that messes with your body and or brain enough to knock you unconscious and when you come to you are half naked and three men you've never seen before are leaning over you attaching wires to your body and shoving things down your throat? Seriously, he must have thought he'd been abducted by aliens and the probing was about to begin. I don't blame him one bit for screaming.


Well, we got him calmed down and quietly and carefully explained what was happening. He was oriented to where he was, who he was, and what day it was but couldn't explain what had happened to him. What became humorous (later anyway) was that even once he was calm enough to answer questions he would occasionally look at one of us in surprise and give a shriek, "Ahhhhh". I asked him what was wrong and he said, "I'm scared". Well I kind of figured that. He denied any pain but had a very abnormal heart rate and rhythm. He had an internal cardiac defibrillator but said he had not felt it fire.

The ambulance arrived and I rode along with them to the hospital just in case it happened again. His wife said he had just gone rigid and then unconscious, come around and out of it, and then did it again (which is when we showed up). Well, he just got better and better as we rode to the hospital. His color improved, his BP settled down, he remained calm. His heart rhythm was still funky but he was doing much better, especially considering he had gone from pretty much dead to awake and fighting in about ten seconds. I thought for sure we were going to be working a code blue when we first saw him, but when we dropped him off in the E.R. he just looked mildly put out. So, I guess that's a good thing.