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Last week, one of our readers wrote a “Letter to the editor” describing an experience he’d had with a friend who collapsed and nearly died after suffering a sudden heart attack.
Luckily, members of the rescue squad arrived in time to begin cardiopulmonary resuscitation, keeping him alive until another unit equipped with Advanced Life Support equipment arrived on the scene. The patient was revived, stabilized, rushed to the hospital, and he survived.
This past weekend there was another, similar incident. This time, however, the outcome was not happy. This patient did not survive.
The two incidents point out an important fact about the difficulties faced by rescue squads in providing emergency medical care in the county. Even if there are squad members at the building who can respond as soon as a call is received, there are many places that they cannot reach within the fourto six-minute “window” within which they have some hope of reviving a patient in cardiac arrest.
In most cases, there is not a squad standing by at its building, and considerably more than four to six minutes will elapse before they arrive at the scene. For a patient who has stopped breathing, that’s too long. When heart and brain tissue is deprived of oxygen for more than those few precious minutes, it dies — and so does the patient.
That observation is not a criticism of the county’s r, ^ dedicated volunteer fire and rescue personnel. It’s simply a fact.
Those volunteers are the first to say that the most important thing that the members of the community could do to assist the rescue squads in their work is to take a Red Cross course in cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). The technique is not difficult, and can be performed by one person, or by two people working together. The course typically takes two evenings, or about six to eight hours.
It can also save lives. CPR provides the lungs and blood with oxygen through mouth-to-mouth respiration, and chest compressions circulate the blood even though the victim’s heart may have stopped beating.
February is Heart Month, a time when the American Heart Association focuses public awareness on the need for taking care of our hearts.
That’s a worthy goal. But we’d like to urge our readers to take a CPR course, so that they have the training to take care of someone else’s heart as well. Information about CPR courses is available by calling the Rappahannock-Rapidan Emergency Medical Services Council in Culpeper (825-6849).
As a footnote, if someone complains of chest pain, dizziness, nausea or difficulty breathing, call the dispatch center and request a rescue squad. Don’t wait, even if the patient insists that there’s nothing wrong. Denial is a common reaction to the symptoms of a heart attack. It could mean the difference between life and death.
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