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Resuscitation Can Save Lives: Training the Public

2016; Elsevier BV; Volume: 69; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.annemergmed.2016.06.009

1097-6760

Mirza Noor Ali Baig,

Disaster Response and Management

I am an emergency physician, and dealing with life-threatening emergencies such as sudden cardiac arrest is something I do daily. I am not a storyteller, but today I am going to tell you a story that changed my life and my attitude toward being an emergency physician altogether. It is the story of my mother…. On June 13, 2015, I left my house to go the Sports Center at the Aga Khan University Hospital with my wife and daughter. It was our routine to go there for a swim or a workout. My mother met me, my wife, and daughter warmly and with a lovely smile on her face that I and my wife never experienced before. It was different. Usually my mother asked me not to stay out too late, but that day she just didn’t say it, and that surprised me. Again, there was something different. We reached the Sports Center, and within an hour my wife received a call from my father informing us that my mother was not well and asking us to come back. My wife heard my mother shouting in pain. Immediately we rushed back home. On our way back, we mobilized the ambulance with the physician and paramedics. We also mobilized our neighbors and relatives who live nearby, including a couple of physicians. On our way back, we were constantly in touch with my father on the telephone, who was updating us about my mother’s condition. It’s hardly a 10-minute journey to my home from the Aga Khan University Hospital, but that night we experienced a particularly bad traffic jam all the way to my home. It was an unusual day. After we had been stuck in traffic approximately half an hour, my father told us that my mother had closed her eyes and stopped screaming, and there was froth coming out of her mouth. I was a few kilometers away from my house at that time, and traffic was crawling. I asked my wife to take over driving the car, and I started to run with my heart pounding and my eyes full of tears. I was completely unaware of what was happening around me. All I knew was I had to get home to save my mother. On my way, I received a call from the ambulance that they had also been stuck in traffic for the past half hour. Having gone through all this torture, I reached home profusely sweating in approximately 40 to 45 minutes to find a group of people outside my home, including my neighbors and a few relatives who live nearby and managed to make it before me. There was a physician among them too. I rushed into the house to my mother’s room, where she was lying comfortably with her eyes closed as if she were sleeping. Her face was so peaceful that I couldn’t remember whether I had ever seen her in such peace before. Being an emergency physician, I started performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) immediately without realizing my surroundings. But as soon as I started doing it, I heard somebody shouting, “Please don’t do it! It’s too late!” And then I realized it actually was too late…. My mother was no more…. I shouted and I cried till I realized that my father, who is in his eighties, was not in the room. I rushed outside only to find my father saying, “She passed away waiting for you my son…!” I felt that the world had ended for me. It felt as though I had been shot by a cannonball right in the center of my chest. It was all over within minutes. My mother was no longer there for me. I felt that I was alone in the world. I asked my father whether she asked about me in her last minutes. He replied, “Yes. And when I told her that your son is running to come to you, she forgot her pain and was calm for once.” That made me feel a little better, but the knowledge that I was not there with my mother in her final moments will remain with me as long as I live. Maybe she was meant to go, but the guilt of not being there and not being able to provide her CPR despite being trained will remain with me throughout my life. Although nothing can bring my mother back now, this experience has taught me that people need to learn CPR and its importance in saving lives. In countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, some of the public has been trained in performing CPR in such situations through different community-based programs. This not only makes people understand that they can save lives but also gives them awareness about the value of a human life by helping them recognize situations such as sudden cardiac arrest. A number of people die because of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in Pakistan just because they are not able to receive immediate resuscitation or CPR. This has inspired me to teach my community how to perform CPR and make them believe that they can save lives doing that! I have started to reach the community with my team of emergency physicians to teach CPR, but this effort is still in its early phase and will require a lot of hard work and determination. But I know that my mother somewhere up in the heavens will never let me get tired of this! The author acknowledges Kanwal Nayani, MBBS, and Asad Mian, MD, PhD, for reviewing the article and providing valuable comments.