I am happy that I can love my wife and my children dearly. However, the flipside of this is whenever any of them show any signs of getting sick I get extremely worried. I simply do not want anything bad to happen to them, and am worried to go to a doctor too late. My gut instinct is to go to the emergency room for every small issue, but I consciousely understand that this is not a logical response.
Do any of you have suggestions on how I can figure out what an appropriate response to different types of sickness symptoms would be?
My wife was just making fun of me yesterday to my doctor sister in law for that one time we were camping in Germany and I went all fast and furious and parked in front of the emergency gate of the hospital when my son got stung by a bee in the neck. I try to reason myself but that day my primal instinct kicked in stronger than I could ignore.
[Not a doctor, take with a grain of salt] This is the only reaction I would consider appropriate in that situation. Bees kill lots of people, you don’t know if you’re allergic until one has stung you, and anaphylaxis acts extremely fast, specially in the neck so close to the airways.
Critical care Paramedic here: The reaction above is the worst one basically. Worse than doing nothing. Don’t do that.
Yes, anaphylaxis is bad and kills people. If it is that bad ,you will know that something is wrong within 60-120seconds. (That’s why epipen exist)
But: There is a shit load of things that can be done in between “getting stung” and “cardiac arrest” in terms of first aid - and emergency medical dispatchers can and will tell you what to do. None of them can be done properly in a moving private vehicle.
But what happens - more often than it should is people doing these stunts risking the lives of others, having an accident themselves or simply delivering a dead patient to a hospital that could have easily been saved by basic first aid and an ambulance.
And to make matters worse: You will very likely be in a even worse spot. EDs in a lot of countries(it is surely the case in Germany)are not necessarily staffed by people who are experienced with paediatric anaphylaxis patients and only a minority of hospitals deal with any paediatric patients at all. If you’re unlucky an intern with 1.5 years of post graduation experience who didn’t even see an adult anaphylactic reaction so far will staff the ED, has no equipment to deal with paediatric patients and one can only hope the intensivist/anaesthesiologist on duty is not currently dealing with other stuff. While ambulance staff get trained in this shit regularly, it has more than enough equipment available, and can bring in specialist staff (critcare, physician response units, helicopters) - and believe me,most ambulance systems will make that a “send everyone” call. (For my neck of the woods: Neighbourhood app alarm to send off duty personnel, volunteer first responders from a charity or closest BLS ambulance, ALS resource, physicians response car, potentially helicopter with paediatric intensivist)
So…for fucks sake people,call an ambulance. In most industrial nations they will be faster, they will know what to do, where to transport and you won’t risk crashing into other people or having a dead patient in the backseat by the time you arrive.
(BTW: It’s extremely rare for an sting into the skin of the neck to actually impede the airway due to it’s location - there are very few tissues where this can become an issue. Totally different for stings within the airway and mouth, but most stings outside that lead to airway obstruction would have led to the same result for a sting into the arm. The location does not have direct causation for the location of the systemic reaction)
That was precisely my reasoning, we didn’t know if he’s allergic and especially in the neck it could’ve gone from fine to dead real quick, and I’m not about to improvise a tracheotomy… I get why she teases me though, I really acted like I was in an action movie lol.