The First Five Minutes or How to Save a Life
So having a career as an oncology nurse doesn't often provide me with the opportunity to tell people that "I save lives." More often than not, I prolong them with life sustaining treatment at great cost. (But that's beside the point for today.)
The topic for today is CPR. Just this week I had the great experience of being able to provide excellent CPR, along with my outstanding co-workers to a technically dead patient. Family member yells out "I think she stopped breathing" or the equivelant and I and 2 other nurses ran in the room to start CPR and pushed the code button. We were surrounded almost instantly by about 10 of our colleagues to help us start extra IV's, bring in the crash cart, get the cardiac monitor hooked up. But I was one of the 3 people providing the "high quality CPR."
When it was all over we estimated that the patient had been down (or without heart beat or respirations) for about a 60-90 seconds before the start of CPR. When we found her, she had no pulse, no spontaneous respirations. We gave 5 cycles of CPR, checked for a pulse. No heart beat. Asystole. Changed rescuers, did another five cycles, stopped to check for pulse and respirations just as the code team got there. BINGO. Just as we started to see a flutter on the monitor we felt a pulse and she was breathing on her own. Wow.
That's the kind of situation that makes me want to teach a bystander CPR class, because so much of that patient's survival dependend on the fact that compressions and ventillation were begun immediately after her cardiac arrest. In the field it can take EMS as long as 15 minutes to respond to a cardiac arrest and through no fault of their own. Just today while driving to pick Evangeline up from school I watched at least 5 cars block an ambulance light up with sirens blaring. Those cars must have added at least two minutes to the ambulance response time. And I wondered if those two minutes would cost someone a life.
I know that sounds over-dramatic but it reality. We know from research that the number one cause of death in the US is heart disease. While most of you may never witness sudden cardiac arrest, the only way someone can survive it is early CPR, early defibrilation and early advanced care. That means that you and I, the bystanders have to jump right in and start pounding on their chest and breathing for them. We have to petition for more schools, malls and sports venues to have AED's. And we have to get our cars out of the way so that EMS can get people to the hospital.
I'm a nurse. This my job. I saved someone's life because I know CPR. Do you? Could you save someone's life?