Had a partner for almost a year on the volunteer squad, we rode hard then, put in tons of hours together. He never told anyone he took meds for seizures. A few yrs back, after running a hard 25hrs during one of the bike rallies, we had signed off and left the hospital. I had my face in the laptop typing up the report when I notice we are slowly idling down the road, through a red light, I look over and he's seizing in the drivers seat, i flip on the lights and steer us across the street to the curb and knock it into park. By the time I got out and around to his side he had stopped seizing but was pretty out of it. After a minute he started coming around, looked at me with a wild look in his eyes, pushed me out of the way and took off towards the road. By then the light had changed traffic was going, and it's busy, it's bike week. I took off after him and tackled him before he could get smacked by the traffic, What a sight we must have been for the tourists, a Paramedic chasing down and tackling his EMT at a busy intersection. I walked him back and sat him on the bumper, got dispatch to send me some help. Seems he hadn't had a seizure in years, always compliant with his meds. He didn't take his meds that day, don't know if that, or the stress of the day, or a combo of both, overtired brought it on. It was a hell of a day though, we had 4 pretty tough traumas, and assisted other units twice with arrests, mixed in with a ton of regular calls and minor wrecks. He recovered form the seizure, and he recovered from the broken Scapula I gave him when I tackled him.
. I laugh about it now, but sometimes I think, what if he had a seizure an hour earlier when we were running to a wreck, or heading to the hospital with 3 of us in the back working a trauma.
