ER doctor here: It is exceedingly uncommon to see a patient who would have died had they not come to the ER a minute earlier.
I have heard numerous patients make claims like this and in the rare case that it’s both potentially relevant to their current care AND I have enough time to look … I’ve looked up the relevant records. In precisely zero of those cases would the person have died if they waited another hour. Another day? Sure.
I’ve had one personal case where the guy would have died if he had waited any longer to come in. He felt odd. Lightheaded. Nothing specific. 40 something generally healthy guy. Went into VFib right after he arrived. Shocked him out of it. He went back into a fatal arrhythmia a few more times but ultimately stabilized after more shocks and amio. If he hadn’t arrived in the ER when he did, there’s a high chance he either would have died, or not walked out neurologically intact like he did.
I have worked as an ER nurse for 5 years now. I can’t think of a single patient that was not a trauma patient that would have died had they come just one minute later.
Not quite the same, but many many years ago I had accidentally overdosed on fentanyl. Haven’t touched anything in 9 years but yeah..
By the time they got me awake they used two bottles of narcan, my lips were blue and my breathing was so laboured that they told me if they were a minute or two longer I’d be dead.
However you realistically have about 5 minutes in cardiac arrest as an adult (with no intervention) before you’d be significantly braindead.
Anything where you’re not breathing ie choking, cardiac arrest. Opioid OD the minutes absolutely matter. Probably not anything outside of that is so time specific
I’m a respiratory therapist and work in the ER. It’s pretty common to have patients code in the ambulance on their way to the ER. But I think in these situations, they know right away that things are bad and they barely make it. One of the paramedics who taught my CPR class said that since we’re in a dense, but geographically small municipality with 2 hospitals, the chance of surviving cardiac arrest is much higher than average. They call once they’re in the rig and they’re outside the hospital by the time report is given.
Not quite a minute or two but hours myself. I was so far into diabetic ketoacidosis before I was first diagnosed type 1. I was so weak I couldn’t even make it back down the stairs to get to the ER after a doctor visit. I was in DKA for months before my body started to fail.
My mother had left the state for the weekend so I was alone and couldn’t do anything. Thankfully she came back when she did because even the doctors and nurses said I wouldn’t have made it another day. Spent almost a week in the ICU before I was even stepped down to the ER.
As most have said, maybe not “one minute”, but we see patients every day that if they didn’t come in when they did, it would have ended much differently.
Not an ER doc, but the story of my birth kinda touches on this. Without too much detail around 9am December 2nd my mom went in for a pregnancy check up and was told she needed to be admitted right away and induced or she and i will die within the hour. “You will have a stroke and die [at any moment]” She didnt listen, because she had two other kids and a husband who couldnt leave work. She went home and basically laid on the couch trying to stay calm and not raise her blood pressure anymore (it was triple over triple at the docs). She went to the ER the next morning where her OB was waiting. She was injected with the medication to get things started and i came out in three light pushes the doc had to catch me with one hand as a result. Sans a few days in the nicu bc i was a preme and my mom needing a lil observation we were fine. Shes an unreliable story teller but she tells it like she was on the verge of death and was actively fighting the reaper himself. Ovbs she was in trouble but not like that.
My mom was told that if she was thirty minutes later bringing me in to the ER, I would’ve died. To be fair, I was 5 months old and had a severe case of rotavirus and I was so dehydrated that my eye sockets were sunken. They also had a lot of trouble getting an IV in me because my veins were collapsed, so they had to put in a port.
My lung collapsed and I thought it was anxiety when I finally ended up in the ER I had to sign a paper and then into a room for an emergency chest tube. The urgency in which they worked around me definitely felt like one of those I could’ve died moments, but no one ever said it to me. I’m curious if it has ever actually been said to a patient out loud.
My stepdad showed up at the hospital for a scheduled colonoscopy with a heart rate of 23. He was admitted immediately and given a pacemaker. Not really a one minute situation, but if he hasn’t had the colonoscopy appointment he would have stayed home alone all day and probably been dead by the time my mother got home from work.
The only one I can think of was the dude that coded in the parking lot after driving himself to the ED feeling short of breath. If he wouldn’t have gotten into the parking lot when he did, things could have gotten real ugly real quick, especially if he’d coded while driving.
One story that I’ll never forget is a family of 6 (2 parents, 2 kids, 2 grandparents staying over) who saved themselves from a collective carbon monoxyde poisoning by sheer luck :
Everybody was asleep, the mom got up to pee, and fainted (from the CO poisoning) on her way back to bed. The sound of her fall woke her husband up who checked on her and called an ambulance. The first responders’ CO detectors went off upon arrival and they evacuated everyone.
If she didn’t have to pee, they’d be all dead.
If she just made a few more steps and reached her bed without fainting, they’d be all dead.
If the husband had a heavier sleep and didn’t hear her fall, they’d all be dead.
If they thought the fainting was nothing and she’d see a doctor the next day, they’d be all dead.
Instead I had them all in the ER casually recovering from a moderate poisoning, chatting casually about this “unusual night” they were having, completely oblivious to how close they all got to make the local news the next day. It was eerie.
I never really saw this in the ED to be honest. The human body is amazingly resilient, especially when it has some time to adjust. I had plenty of people walk in and I was like “holy shit, how long have you just been walking around like this?”
In my last job I had a patient who had a VT arrest while visiting his mom (also our patient) on the tele floor of our hospital. It could have easily killed him if it had happened almost anywhere else. He came through it neurologically intact and in pretty good shape.(Other than needing a heart transplant)
I worked in the ER as a doctor and I’ve never said that to be honest nor have I seen many cases where that would be the case. Perhaps just heart attacks and strokes within the period for thrombolysis.
L&D nurse here. I had a patient who was 38+3, pregnant with twins. She was checking in for a routine induction. History of panic disorder and anxiety but nothing else.
Got her admitted over the next hour. She had some borderline hypertensive pressures (high 130s over 80s) and when I placed her IV her heart rate went up to 130. Concerning, but in no way emergent, and possibly related to the panic disorder.
With no obvious event or explanation, Baby A had a precipitous drop into the 50s. I went into the room and her sats were in the 70s, heart rate 178. We ran her to the operating room and delivered her emergently, then transferred her to the ICU.
Final diagnosis? Acute heart failure with an EF of 17%. It was sheer dumb luck that she was scheduled for an induction within an hour of her heart deciding to crump.
I imagine (as a non ER person) that these types of events are regarding trauma events. Like Jeremy Renner if he had not had the resources to get medevacced to the hospital right away. I know someone who had a widow maker but they were very close to the hospital and were able to survive.
All the damn time.
Heck the other week I had a guy come in and tell me his heart isn’t beating. I assured him it was. He then argued with me, and I smiled while saying ” you’d not be able to tell at me it your heart had stopped beating as you claimed sir”
Honestly, most of those stories are exaggerated. It’s not that people are lying, but the average person doesn’t have a good grasp on just how sick they really were. Without medical knowledge or anything to compare it to, they assume they were seconds away from death when in reality they probably had more time than they think. From our side, we see genuinely critical cases every day, so the perspective is very different.
What I hear more frequently is, “then this <object> hit me in the <body part> and the doctors said if it had been one millimeter to the left, I would have been dead”
I recently had a patient carried in by her dad that was peri-arrest from anaphylaxis. Dad was uncomfortable using her epi-pen and thought he was close enough to the hospital to drive in instead of calling 911. She had weak central pulses, no peripheral pulses, and her BP was 50/30s on arrival. She was minutes? away from a bad outcome potentially. We did a lot of education and she ended up okay. If you have an epi-pen, know how to use it.
Emergency calltaker here. Most recent was a small child choking on some food. The ambulance my colleague sent was 10 minutes away the helicopter 15. While i was giving first aid instructions to the parents my colleague called the local family doctor, who in a stroke of luck took a last glance at his phone before he would have gone for a run where he would have left it at home. He was there within a minute and managed to dislodge the stuck food.
I was patient transport services in highschool. My favorite was a guy had gotten in a car accident and had his bone sticking out of his arm. He did the “I’d have been dead in a few more minutes!” And kept trying to have all services directed at himself. 1 hour later they brought in his passenger who had his arm torn off and was impaled through the chest with a peice of a sign after they freed him from the wreck. He demanded starbursts and water ice at our earliest convenience.
I’m not an ER nurse. However, I am a recovering Acute Myloid Leukemia patient. I was told that my prognosis wasn’t ideal by very skilled and cagey communicators. I picked up on my care team’s careful wording very early on. They never made declarations like, you only have a certain time frame. Making promises and definite declarations opens them up to lawsuits so they do need to be careful about what they say.
The only time anyone came close to saying, “one more minute and you will be dead” is when I was preparing to have a bone marrow transplant. Unfortunately, the prebmt testing showed that my leukemia had come raging back. I remember the initial phone call I had with one of my oncologists after the new wave of cancer was discovered. He repeatedly apologized, told me that sometimes he needs to just sit in his car and scream in frustration (bless him. I can’t imagine the stress he works under. I would scream in my car too.) while we discussed next steps. Reading between the lines I definitely understood that no oncologist apologizes like that unless they feel like they have failed.
Years later he disclosed that he was shocked I made it to remission.
Maybe I didn’t and still don’t ask the right questions in the right manner to elicit a dramatic response, but this has just been my experience while living with a severe illness.
But recently we had a patient who was coming by EMS as a STEMI, then coded in the ambulance bay. Got him to the Cath lab immediately and he survived fully neuro intact and went back to work a month later.
If he had driven himself to the hospital or if EMS had chosen a hospital slightly farther away, he probably would not have had the same outcome.
Couple year ago I had a 13 yo boy come in one time after a skateboarding accident who had a sizable epidural hematoma but was neurologically fine. Hospital I was at did not have a pediatric ICU and I’m not a pediatric neurosurgeon, so was arranging for helicopter transfer. As that was brewing he went comatose and blew a pupil, so I took him to the OR for a crani and evac, then straight to CT to confirm no recollection, then helicopter to hospital with peds ICU. He walked out the hospital two days later. Just the nature of epidural hematomas. If he had blown a pupil in the helo, not insignificant chance he would’ve had permanent injury or been dead on arrival.
I’m certainly no ER nurse and was obviously too young to remember it (or be able to validate) but I’m told that a few weeks or months (not sure) after I was born that:
1: I was sleeping WAY too much.
2: My mother had already had two kids, so she knew it was particularly unusual.
She took me to the family doctor who immediately called an ambulance and there was a team waiting when I got to ER.
I had scepticaemia and it was pretty touch and go. Story goes that my parents were warned they may need to start making arrangements.
According to the story, if mum hadn’t already had the experience of having a couple of bubs then she probably wouldn’t have clocked that I was way too sleepy for a new-born.
I was told this story a few times growing up, but now that mum is older she says she doesn’t even remember it, as with most of our early years.
No idea if it’s true or not TBH.
The other ‘near misses’ in emergency I remember were the almost monthly childhood asthma attacks that always had dad racing through red lights and occasionally being stopped by cops who then escorted us to ER, after which I’d spend a week in the oxygen tent. I DEFINITELY remember those, but can’t attest as to whether I was really minutes away from death.
Can’t really validate the first story but I always feel for my parents at how stressful it must have been for them with the almost monthly visits to ER for asthma. I’d be terrified if I had to go through that as a parent.
All the time. I hear them in the ER because it’s often the first thing people mention and they’ll go on to use terms that they heard from the doctor that they don’t understand but shows that they were fine. Then I’ll look in their records and I’ll find it to be BS.
But it happens, for sure. Maybe not “one more minute” but one or two more days. I’ll see that a few times a week. Which, yeah, it’s an emergency department. That’s what we do.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, we had a middle aged female come in breathing relatively fast, appear slightly pale – bp was soft but within normal limits ekg was fine- she had a triple A in the room of the ER and that was it. I can’t recall if she went to surgery or if was futile.
We also had a Thai boxer come in get hit in the chest at the exact wrong time, could not get him out of his not conducive to life rhythm. Young like 22.
I’m not an ER nurse but I will share my own story: my son was in the NICU after giving birth to him at 32 weeks (complete placenta previa), and I was visiting him for the weekend. I got the worst headache of my entire life and nothing was helping. Next thing you know I began to feel really weird and couldn’t breathe and called the nurse in. I was having a stroke! If I had not been there and the nurse hadn’t come in that very minute I would have been a loooottttt worse off. They were able to get me on oxygen immediately and it was below 80%
I’m not in the medical field, but I have a cousin who had a stroke while in the hospital for a routine appointment that was unrelated. She made it out completely fine, but she’d have had some real damage if she wasn’t literally already where they could help her
Me! Blue lips and short of breath but refused to go. Ambulance came. The ER nurses tried to explain and helped calm my husband before I put in an induced coma. I had heart and lung failure due to sepsis. Chest tubes were placed and surgeries followed. But sincerely it was the ER nurses and ICU nurses that saved me multiple times from drowning in my fluids and lack of O2. They believed me, it wasn’t anxiety. Thank You Nurses!! They held my hand and stayed with me when scared ♥️.
I am not am emt but, my grandpa had mild chest pains and went to the ER and they kept him over night just in case. Turns out he had a small heart attack and went into surgery during the surgery he had one of the worst strokes they had seen at that hospital. If he had not been in the surgery roon at the time, he could have never walked again.
I’m not an ER nurse but I’m in healthcare. I do not know how many times people have told me they were legally dead for two minutes. People that are legally dead are fuckin dead. If you were brought back that means you were not dead.
IM doc here. I had a guy who came in after feeling “weird in the chest” all day. 40s, athletic, in the middle of a divorce, stressed. EKG looked ok. I see nonspecific chest pain all day long and it’s usually heartburn or stress or a strained rib muscle and I was SO CLOSE to sending him out with some Maalox but there was something about this guy that made me send him to the ED. I asked if he wanted a wheelchair escort and he said no, he’d walk. (It was about 200 feet).
Anyway, an hour later I logged back into his chart to see how things were going in the ED and the first thing I see is a code note. He’d made it to the ED, gotten some blood drawn and turned out to be having a mild heart attack and while the doc was delivering the news and explaining next steps he’d had a cardiac arrest. They got him back immediately since having your arrest in an ED in front of a emergency physician is kind of a best case scenario. When I saw him again a week later he was doing great but told me that he’d almost gone to get some food (it was lunchtime) before going to the ED but decided against it. If he’d waited he would have had his arrest in a Jimmy John’s and things probably would not have gone so well for him.
Anyway, almost 20 years of practice and that’s my closest call.
When I was 12, I spent a week throwing up strange colors and having cramps in my guts. At the end of the week I woke up one morning and it hurt so much I couldn’t even get out of bed.
My mom was very alarmed, called her friend who said I was probably faking and to see if I was better by Monday (this was Saturday morning). My mom fortunately decided to call an ambulance anyway, and I was rushed into emergency surgery as soon as I got to the hospital.
That week of leadup was my appendix telling me it was in distress, and Saturday morning it burst. According to what I was told later, another hour delay and I’d have been dead from the toxic crap my guts were swimming in. As it was I spent almost 2 weeks in the hospital.
Comments
ER doctor here: It is exceedingly uncommon to see a patient who would have died had they not come to the ER a minute earlier.
I have heard numerous patients make claims like this and in the rare case that it’s both potentially relevant to their current care AND I have enough time to look … I’ve looked up the relevant records. In precisely zero of those cases would the person have died if they waited another hour. Another day? Sure.
I’ve had one personal case where the guy would have died if he had waited any longer to come in. He felt odd. Lightheaded. Nothing specific. 40 something generally healthy guy. Went into VFib right after he arrived. Shocked him out of it. He went back into a fatal arrhythmia a few more times but ultimately stabilized after more shocks and amio. If he hadn’t arrived in the ER when he did, there’s a high chance he either would have died, or not walked out neurologically intact like he did.
Why would you ask the nurses and not the doctors?
I have worked as an ER nurse for 5 years now. I can’t think of a single patient that was not a trauma patient that would have died had they come just one minute later.
Not quite the same, but many many years ago I had accidentally overdosed on fentanyl. Haven’t touched anything in 9 years but yeah..
By the time they got me awake they used two bottles of narcan, my lips were blue and my breathing was so laboured that they told me if they were a minute or two longer I’d be dead.
A minute? No.
However you realistically have about 5 minutes in cardiac arrest as an adult (with no intervention) before you’d be significantly braindead.
Anything where you’re not breathing ie choking, cardiac arrest. Opioid OD the minutes absolutely matter. Probably not anything outside of that is so time specific
I’m a respiratory therapist and work in the ER. It’s pretty common to have patients code in the ambulance on their way to the ER. But I think in these situations, they know right away that things are bad and they barely make it. One of the paramedics who taught my CPR class said that since we’re in a dense, but geographically small municipality with 2 hospitals, the chance of surviving cardiac arrest is much higher than average. They call once they’re in the rig and they’re outside the hospital by the time report is given.
Not quite a minute or two but hours myself. I was so far into diabetic ketoacidosis before I was first diagnosed type 1. I was so weak I couldn’t even make it back down the stairs to get to the ER after a doctor visit. I was in DKA for months before my body started to fail.
My mother had left the state for the weekend so I was alone and couldn’t do anything. Thankfully she came back when she did because even the doctors and nurses said I wouldn’t have made it another day. Spent almost a week in the ICU before I was even stepped down to the ER.
As most have said, maybe not “one minute”, but we see patients every day that if they didn’t come in when they did, it would have ended much differently.
Not an ER doc, but the story of my birth kinda touches on this. Without too much detail around 9am December 2nd my mom went in for a pregnancy check up and was told she needed to be admitted right away and induced or she and i will die within the hour. “You will have a stroke and die [at any moment]” She didnt listen, because she had two other kids and a husband who couldnt leave work. She went home and basically laid on the couch trying to stay calm and not raise her blood pressure anymore (it was triple over triple at the docs). She went to the ER the next morning where her OB was waiting. She was injected with the medication to get things started and i came out in three light pushes the doc had to catch me with one hand as a result. Sans a few days in the nicu bc i was a preme and my mom needing a lil observation we were fine. Shes an unreliable story teller but she tells it like she was on the verge of death and was actively fighting the reaper himself. Ovbs she was in trouble but not like that.
My mom was told that if she was thirty minutes later bringing me in to the ER, I would’ve died. To be fair, I was 5 months old and had a severe case of rotavirus and I was so dehydrated that my eye sockets were sunken. They also had a lot of trouble getting an IV in me because my veins were collapsed, so they had to put in a port.
My lung collapsed and I thought it was anxiety when I finally ended up in the ER I had to sign a paper and then into a room for an emergency chest tube. The urgency in which they worked around me definitely felt like one of those I could’ve died moments, but no one ever said it to me. I’m curious if it has ever actually been said to a patient out loud.
My stepdad showed up at the hospital for a scheduled colonoscopy with a heart rate of 23. He was admitted immediately and given a pacemaker. Not really a one minute situation, but if he hasn’t had the colonoscopy appointment he would have stayed home alone all day and probably been dead by the time my mother got home from work.
Paramedic here. I hold them in the same regard as patients that have a two page “allergy” list.
The only one I can think of was the dude that coded in the parking lot after driving himself to the ED feeling short of breath. If he wouldn’t have gotten into the parking lot when he did, things could have gotten real ugly real quick, especially if he’d coded while driving.
I always like Boyles response when he got shot in the ass. “The doctor said an inch to the left and 3 feet higher and I would have died.”
One story that I’ll never forget is a family of 6 (2 parents, 2 kids, 2 grandparents staying over) who saved themselves from a collective carbon monoxyde poisoning by sheer luck :
Everybody was asleep, the mom got up to pee, and fainted (from the CO poisoning) on her way back to bed. The sound of her fall woke her husband up who checked on her and called an ambulance. The first responders’ CO detectors went off upon arrival and they evacuated everyone.
If she didn’t have to pee, they’d be all dead.
If she just made a few more steps and reached her bed without fainting, they’d be all dead.
If the husband had a heavier sleep and didn’t hear her fall, they’d all be dead.
If they thought the fainting was nothing and she’d see a doctor the next day, they’d be all dead.
Instead I had them all in the ER casually recovering from a moderate poisoning, chatting casually about this “unusual night” they were having, completely oblivious to how close they all got to make the local news the next day. It was eerie.
I never really saw this in the ED to be honest. The human body is amazingly resilient, especially when it has some time to adjust. I had plenty of people walk in and I was like “holy shit, how long have you just been walking around like this?”
In my last job I had a patient who had a VT arrest while visiting his mom (also our patient) on the tele floor of our hospital. It could have easily killed him if it had happened almost anywhere else. He came through it neurologically intact and in pretty good shape.(Other than needing a heart transplant)
I worked in the ER as a doctor and I’ve never said that to be honest nor have I seen many cases where that would be the case. Perhaps just heart attacks and strokes within the period for thrombolysis.
L&D nurse here. I had a patient who was 38+3, pregnant with twins. She was checking in for a routine induction. History of panic disorder and anxiety but nothing else.
Got her admitted over the next hour. She had some borderline hypertensive pressures (high 130s over 80s) and when I placed her IV her heart rate went up to 130. Concerning, but in no way emergent, and possibly related to the panic disorder.
With no obvious event or explanation, Baby A had a precipitous drop into the 50s. I went into the room and her sats were in the 70s, heart rate 178. We ran her to the operating room and delivered her emergently, then transferred her to the ICU.
Final diagnosis? Acute heart failure with an EF of 17%. It was sheer dumb luck that she was scheduled for an induction within an hour of her heart deciding to crump.
I imagine (as a non ER person) that these types of events are regarding trauma events. Like Jeremy Renner if he had not had the resources to get medevacced to the hospital right away. I know someone who had a widow maker but they were very close to the hospital and were able to survive.
All the damn time.
Heck the other week I had a guy come in and tell me his heart isn’t beating. I assured him it was. He then argued with me, and I smiled while saying ” you’d not be able to tell at me it your heart had stopped beating as you claimed sir”
Honestly, most of those stories are exaggerated. It’s not that people are lying, but the average person doesn’t have a good grasp on just how sick they really were. Without medical knowledge or anything to compare it to, they assume they were seconds away from death when in reality they probably had more time than they think. From our side, we see genuinely critical cases every day, so the perspective is very different.
What I hear more frequently is, “then this <object> hit me in the <body part> and the doctors said if it had been one millimeter to the left, I would have been dead”
I recently had a patient carried in by her dad that was peri-arrest from anaphylaxis. Dad was uncomfortable using her epi-pen and thought he was close enough to the hospital to drive in instead of calling 911. She had weak central pulses, no peripheral pulses, and her BP was 50/30s on arrival. She was minutes? away from a bad outcome potentially. We did a lot of education and she ended up okay. If you have an epi-pen, know how to use it.
Emergency calltaker here. Most recent was a small child choking on some food. The ambulance my colleague sent was 10 minutes away the helicopter 15. While i was giving first aid instructions to the parents my colleague called the local family doctor, who in a stroke of luck took a last glance at his phone before he would have gone for a run where he would have left it at home. He was there within a minute and managed to dislodge the stuck food.
I was patient transport services in highschool. My favorite was a guy had gotten in a car accident and had his bone sticking out of his arm. He did the “I’d have been dead in a few more minutes!” And kept trying to have all services directed at himself. 1 hour later they brought in his passenger who had his arm torn off and was impaled through the chest with a peice of a sign after they freed him from the wreck. He demanded starbursts and water ice at our earliest convenience.
I’m not an ER nurse. However, I am a recovering Acute Myloid Leukemia patient. I was told that my prognosis wasn’t ideal by very skilled and cagey communicators. I picked up on my care team’s careful wording very early on. They never made declarations like, you only have a certain time frame. Making promises and definite declarations opens them up to lawsuits so they do need to be careful about what they say.
The only time anyone came close to saying, “one more minute and you will be dead” is when I was preparing to have a bone marrow transplant. Unfortunately, the prebmt testing showed that my leukemia had come raging back. I remember the initial phone call I had with one of my oncologists after the new wave of cancer was discovered. He repeatedly apologized, told me that sometimes he needs to just sit in his car and scream in frustration (bless him. I can’t imagine the stress he works under. I would scream in my car too.) while we discussed next steps. Reading between the lines I definitely understood that no oncologist apologizes like that unless they feel like they have failed.
Years later he disclosed that he was shocked I made it to remission.
Maybe I didn’t and still don’t ask the right questions in the right manner to elicit a dramatic response, but this has just been my experience while living with a severe illness.
To answer your question, not THAT often.
But recently we had a patient who was coming by EMS as a STEMI, then coded in the ambulance bay. Got him to the Cath lab immediately and he survived fully neuro intact and went back to work a month later.
If he had driven himself to the hospital or if EMS had chosen a hospital slightly farther away, he probably would not have had the same outcome.
Couple year ago I had a 13 yo boy come in one time after a skateboarding accident who had a sizable epidural hematoma but was neurologically fine. Hospital I was at did not have a pediatric ICU and I’m not a pediatric neurosurgeon, so was arranging for helicopter transfer. As that was brewing he went comatose and blew a pupil, so I took him to the OR for a crani and evac, then straight to CT to confirm no recollection, then helicopter to hospital with peds ICU. He walked out the hospital two days later. Just the nature of epidural hematomas. If he had blown a pupil in the helo, not insignificant chance he would’ve had permanent injury or been dead on arrival.
I’m certainly no ER nurse and was obviously too young to remember it (or be able to validate) but I’m told that a few weeks or months (not sure) after I was born that:
1: I was sleeping WAY too much.
2: My mother had already had two kids, so she knew it was particularly unusual.
She took me to the family doctor who immediately called an ambulance and there was a team waiting when I got to ER.
I had scepticaemia and it was pretty touch and go. Story goes that my parents were warned they may need to start making arrangements.
According to the story, if mum hadn’t already had the experience of having a couple of bubs then she probably wouldn’t have clocked that I was way too sleepy for a new-born.
I was told this story a few times growing up, but now that mum is older she says she doesn’t even remember it, as with most of our early years.
No idea if it’s true or not TBH.
The other ‘near misses’ in emergency I remember were the almost monthly childhood asthma attacks that always had dad racing through red lights and occasionally being stopped by cops who then escorted us to ER, after which I’d spend a week in the oxygen tent. I DEFINITELY remember those, but can’t attest as to whether I was really minutes away from death.
Can’t really validate the first story but I always feel for my parents at how stressful it must have been for them with the almost monthly visits to ER for asthma. I’d be terrified if I had to go through that as a parent.
ER nurse.
All the time. I hear them in the ER because it’s often the first thing people mention and they’ll go on to use terms that they heard from the doctor that they don’t understand but shows that they were fine. Then I’ll look in their records and I’ll find it to be BS.
But it happens, for sure. Maybe not “one more minute” but one or two more days. I’ll see that a few times a week. Which, yeah, it’s an emergency department. That’s what we do.
99.999%
On the opposite end of the spectrum, we had a middle aged female come in breathing relatively fast, appear slightly pale – bp was soft but within normal limits ekg was fine- she had a triple A in the room of the ER and that was it. I can’t recall if she went to surgery or if was futile.
We also had a Thai boxer come in get hit in the chest at the exact wrong time, could not get him out of his not conducive to life rhythm. Young like 22.
I’m not an ER nurse but I will share my own story: my son was in the NICU after giving birth to him at 32 weeks (complete placenta previa), and I was visiting him for the weekend. I got the worst headache of my entire life and nothing was helping. Next thing you know I began to feel really weird and couldn’t breathe and called the nurse in. I was having a stroke! If I had not been there and the nurse hadn’t come in that very minute I would have been a loooottttt worse off. They were able to get me on oxygen immediately and it was below 80%
I’m not in the medical field, but I have a cousin who had a stroke while in the hospital for a routine appointment that was unrelated. She made it out completely fine, but she’d have had some real damage if she wasn’t literally already where they could help her
Me! Blue lips and short of breath but refused to go. Ambulance came. The ER nurses tried to explain and helped calm my husband before I put in an induced coma. I had heart and lung failure due to sepsis. Chest tubes were placed and surgeries followed. But sincerely it was the ER nurses and ICU nurses that saved me multiple times from drowning in my fluids and lack of O2. They believed me, it wasn’t anxiety. Thank You Nurses!! They held my hand and stayed with me when scared ♥️.
I am not am emt but, my grandpa had mild chest pains and went to the ER and they kept him over night just in case. Turns out he had a small heart attack and went into surgery during the surgery he had one of the worst strokes they had seen at that hospital. If he had not been in the surgery roon at the time, he could have never walked again.
I’m not an ER nurse but I’m in healthcare. I do not know how many times people have told me they were legally dead for two minutes. People that are legally dead are fuckin dead. If you were brought back that means you were not dead.
IM doc here. I had a guy who came in after feeling “weird in the chest” all day. 40s, athletic, in the middle of a divorce, stressed. EKG looked ok. I see nonspecific chest pain all day long and it’s usually heartburn or stress or a strained rib muscle and I was SO CLOSE to sending him out with some Maalox but there was something about this guy that made me send him to the ED. I asked if he wanted a wheelchair escort and he said no, he’d walk. (It was about 200 feet).
Anyway, an hour later I logged back into his chart to see how things were going in the ED and the first thing I see is a code note. He’d made it to the ED, gotten some blood drawn and turned out to be having a mild heart attack and while the doc was delivering the news and explaining next steps he’d had a cardiac arrest. They got him back immediately since having your arrest in an ED in front of a emergency physician is kind of a best case scenario. When I saw him again a week later he was doing great but told me that he’d almost gone to get some food (it was lunchtime) before going to the ED but decided against it. If he’d waited he would have had his arrest in a Jimmy John’s and things probably would not have gone so well for him.
Anyway, almost 20 years of practice and that’s my closest call.
When I was 12, I spent a week throwing up strange colors and having cramps in my guts. At the end of the week I woke up one morning and it hurt so much I couldn’t even get out of bed.
My mom was very alarmed, called her friend who said I was probably faking and to see if I was better by Monday (this was Saturday morning). My mom fortunately decided to call an ambulance anyway, and I was rushed into emergency surgery as soon as I got to the hospital.
That week of leadup was my appendix telling me it was in distress, and Saturday morning it burst. According to what I was told later, another hour delay and I’d have been dead from the toxic crap my guts were swimming in. As it was I spent almost 2 weeks in the hospital.