96 minutes of CPR with a save

That is what you call team work. Wish we could get more saves with bystanders starting good CPR.
 
I've got to wonder if this guy didn't have an unrecognized ROSC at some point.
 
usalsfyre said:
I've got to wonder if this guy didn't have an unrecognized ROSC at some point.
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I was wondering the same thing. I know we all love hearing about miraculous saves, and want every cardiac arrest pt we come across to survive, but it just doesn't happen that way. We all know the statistics. Either this is a one in a million case OR there was a return of a pulse at some point before 96 minutes and the bystanders just didn't recognize it or the article didn't report it.

CPR is nowhere near as effective as we hope it will be (Mind you, I am talking about CPR not early defibrillation, which has been proven effective time and time again). We need to start spending research dollars on looking to see if there are any alternative treatments that can increase survivability aside from CPR instead of putting all of our faith in just one practice.
 
I saw the story on CNN. The anchor mentioned, and stumbled over the pronunciation of Amiodrone. Did they redose the guy with another 300mg bolus? And do they routinely fly cardiac arrests in rural MN?
 
medicRob said:
CPR is nowhere near as effective as we hope it will be (Mind you, I am talking about CPR not early defibrillation, which has been proven effective time and time again). We need to start spending research dollars on looking to see if there are any alternative treatments that can increase survivability aside from CPR instead of putting all of our faith in just one practice.
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You have no idea how often I have wondered that. I know I am just a peon, trained monkey EMT-I, but even I recognize there MUST be something else out there!
 
What we need to spend money on is prevention.

Its unexplainable, what I do know is everyone who had spent any length off time in EMS has a story about a patient that should of died but didn't.

Cherish the second chances
 
n7lxi said:
I saw the story on CNN. The anchor mentioned, and stumbled over the pronunciation of Amiodrone. Did they redose the guy with another 300mg bolus? And do they routinely fly cardiac arrests in rural MN?
Click to expand...

"Goodman and Mary Svoboda also gave Snitzer intravenous drugs to try to restore his heartbeat to normal. When he didn't respond, he called Mayo cardiac-arrest expert Roger White on his cellphone for guidance. Ultimately, they agreed to try a calculated overdose of a heart drug, amiodarone. It worked."

Source: http://www.emsworld.com/article/article.jsp?siteSection=1&id=16323
 
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Reading through the article a few times, it sounds like the flight medics were the first paramedics on scene. The rescue squads from the surrounding towns were 12 and 22 minutes away, which doesn't account for dispatch time and assumes they were at the station when dispatched.

The onscene personnel were using an AED, which indicates that the patient was in a shockable rhythm and not sinus during that time. After the flight crew arrived, they would have hooked up their monitor and pads, and would have been able to visualize the rhythm from that point onward. This would indicate that there probably wasn't ROSC here for any significant amount of time.

I make the assumption that they used an AED because the local rescue crews would have had one, and the fact that the flight crew took over after arrival (which indicates that there wasn't a medic unit already onscene). I know the flight crew had a portable monitor because the article mentions that an ETCO2 detector was connected at some point.

What i'm really surprised about is that the team didn't call it earlier.
 
Wow, amazing!

Now this long pre-hospital CPR is something I thought about on a flight I was on yesterday. What if someone had a heart attack on a flight? Now my flight was short and if someone did, it wouldn't be a big deal because we could be at many airports in a short amount of time. But what about an overseas flight and you are stuck in the middle of the Atlantic? That has had to of happend before.
 
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