(You have to "persuade" them, we can't kidnap people off the street - not yet anyway)
We got called to a 53 year old male who was complaining of difficulty in breathing. When we got there the man was sitting on the floor hyperventilating, after a bit of a chat he told us that he has a history of hyperventilating and of gastric (stomach) pain. He looked alright to me, but there was something that I didn't like about him. He didn't have any other symptoms and his breathing soon settled down to normal leaving him with the gastric pain - which he could control with his medication.
But something just wasn't right - so I persuaded him to come down to the ambulance for a check-up. We wheeled him downstairs and connected him up to our ECG machine - which shows the electrical activity of the heart.
We saw this...
Which I suspect will have the medics who read this weblog jumping up in their chairs.
Basically he was having a heart attack.
Needless to say, we rushed him to hospital, where he got the treatment he needed and has made a good recovery. He had none of the other signs and symptoms of having a heart attack - he wasn't sweaty, his breathing was due to his hyperventilating, he wasn't having any cardiac pain and he just didn't look like he was having a heart attack.
Don't ask me why I thought he needed an ECG, don't ask me why we wheeled him downstairs instead of making him walk, I just guess it was intuition - and I've learnt to always listen to my intuition.
For those who don't know what the above picture shows, allow me to educate you.
The pattern that is normal for a heart trace is more or less this...
But in a heart attack something called the "ST Segment" is raised above the normal line like this...
Basically if it is raised more than two of those little squares there is a strong suspicion that a heart attack is causing it
For all those who are medically trained, I know that this is overwhelmingly simplistic, but I thought I'd give it a go...
For more information you might want to check this site or even here
