but he was unresponsive. I couldn’t as- sess a pulse.
The heavy stench of fuel filled the air.
We pulled him out of the car, moved him 20 feet away, and lay him on the ground. A passerby was on the phone with 911. Another passerby was an off-duty emer- gency medical technician (EMT) who stopped to help. My girlfriend, the EMT, and I could feel his pulse, which was weakly pounding but still stable. He was still completely unresponsive, so we continued tracking his vital signs and waited.
The nearest hospital was 10 miles north in Socorro. His breathing became extremely shallow. The EMT pointed out that the man now had a blown pupil. I was half crouching in the grass of the median, and my muscles were get- ting sore. I was still in a short-sleeved shirt, and the cold hit me. I was shiver- ing too much to feel the radial pulse. By this point, the man’s chest was no longer moving up and down. Police arrived on the scene first, fol- lowed by the ambulance crew. We helped roll the man onto a backboard and put him in the ambulance. As my girlfriend and I were giving our statements to police, I looked at the am- bulance. It was rocking back and forth. The only force that could do that would be chest compressions. He was coding. We watched the ambulance pull away. We left and stopped in Socorro so we
could gather our nerves. My girlfriend said a prayer for the elderly man. It was a long drive to Taos.
L AW FIRM PC
As I lay in bed that night staring up at the ceiling, I realized that even now, at a ripe young age of 23, through the extraordinarily generous actions of the Paul L. Foster School of Medicine, I have already undergone so much training that seeing patients in emergency situations has become incredibly natural in a short period of time. I still have much to learn, but by the time I graduate next year as a physician, I will have become a part of the next generation of well-trained U.S. medical school graduates. I will have joined the ranks of those who have felt the calling to save lives. I’ll be proud to call myself a doctor. n
LeichterTxMedAdV3-3-2013-O.indd 1 6 TEXAS MEDICINE April 2014
8/6/13 1:46 PM
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