Posted on 02/28/2010 11:59:25 PM PST by malkee
PITTSBURGH – With her boyfriend in severe abdominal pain, Sharon Edge called 911 for an ambulance in the early morning hours of Feb. 6. Heavy snow was falling — so heavy it would all but bring the city to a standstill — and Curtis Mitchell needed to go to a hospital. "Help is on the way," the operator said. It never arrived. Nearly 30 hours later — and 10 calls from the couple to 911, four 911 calls to them and at least a dozen calls between 911 and paramedics — Curtis Mitchell died at his home. His electricity knocked out, his heat long off, the 50-year-old former steelworker waited, huddled beneath blankets on his sofa. "I'm very angry, because I feel they didn't do their job like they supposed to," said Edge, 51. "My man would still be living if they'da did they job like they was supposed to ... They took somebody that I love away." Mitchell, on disability for depression, had a history of pancreatitis, an inflammation of the pancreas, Edge said, and had spent nine days in a hospital in late January. He had been home about a week when he was overcome with pain. Autopsy results are pending, awaiting toxicology test results, authorities said. Now Pittsburgh officials have ordered an investigation and reforms of the city's emergency services system as Mitchell's case highlighted key shortcomings:
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Please see my 20 above.
As a volunteer EMT of almost 15 years, I feel horribly bad for this family. However, without knowing what the SOP or protocol is for the duty crew, its hard to judge. If it were my call and I was the crew captain, I would have taken my trauma bag and walked in to render aid. Honestly though, there isnt alot that a BLS crew could have done for the man on their own. You need a paramedic to push meds that would have allievated his pain and a hospital to perform procedures to correct his illness. Also trying to push a man, a quarter mile on a stretcher exposed to the elements in a snowstorm is dicey at best. It also isnt clear what the dispatcher was being told about his condition over the phone, and there are lots of factors that dictate response. What is terrain like where they live etc...Again, my sympathies to the family, but Im pretty sure if the medics could have gotten to him...they would have.
From the article:
“We failed this person,” said Michael Huss, the city’s public safety director.
To be sure, Mitchell’s ordeal unfolded as the storm dumped nearly two feet of snow on Pittsburgh; the 911 system was swamped with more than twice as many calls as usual and overall emergency response was hampered.
Regardless of how deep the snow was, Huss said it was unacceptable that paramedics didn’t walk to help Mitchell. If they had, Huss believes Mitchell may have survived.
“... You get out of that damn truck and you walk to the residence,” Huss said. “That’s what needed to happen. We could have carried him out.”
The six paramedics on the three ambulances could be disciplined, Huss said. He declined to say what that might be.
Paramedics or firefighters will now be required to go to a caller’s door.
“Everyone needs to get a response,” Huss said Thursday.
Hopefully Pittsburgh will add some procedures (such as Denver’s call for volunteers with the proper snow machines).
That’s what they did for my dad. We live on a very steep hill, and the ambulance could not make it up the hill (too slick). They brought a guerney up the hill, and took him back down to the ambulance.
“Humvees can almost always get through as well as very large SUVs.”
Those aren’t politically correct vehicles, especially since we don’t drill enough oil at home.
Things like this are a result of leftists. And to top it off, the man died during a blizzard, the very thing loony leftists have been claiming to want more of.
*
I’m in NC, and it’s very rare to get a large snowfall, but it does happen, maybe a once in a decade event. Without fail, there is a call for emergency volunteers with large, four wheel drive vehicles, to take people in for dialysis and such. There are announcements on all the radio stations and the local television news.
Too bad that wasn’t done in this instance.
It's called a direct quote. Doing anything else would be wrong.
No.
You do not have to try to simulate someone’s accent in a direct written quote. If someone drops the final “r” in “your” due to a regional accent, that need not be “reported”.
These guys are not Mark Twain penning Huckleberry Finn.
Just to be clear, if you said to me “It’s called a direct quote. Doing anything else would be wrong.” and I reported you as saying “It called a die-rect quote. Doin’ anythin’ else woo’ be wrong,” you would have every reason to complain.
This is not Huckleberry Finn.
Likely "racial" though maybe doesn't rise to "racist." Sounds to me like the lady ("Edge," was it?) was speaking in what Harry Reid might refer to as some form of "negro dialect." It isn't that our pigmented bretheren are any less intellectually capable of properly phrased speech patterns, they just feel (or at least act as if they feel) that it is somehow "selling out to Whitey" or "turnin' on da bruvvahs" to speak like an intelligent, educated individual.
Enter as evidence our deeply pigmented bretheren Dr. Alan Keyes, or J.C. Watt, or even "Calypso Louie" Farrakhan; they form words and sentences properly despite the same inner city public school beginnings of folks like "Edge" and her man. It's more a cultural choice made early in life and propagated throughout early adulthood than any non-existent DNA borne limitation.
This choice is reinforced by personally destructive cultural influences (like Rap Music, Spike Lee movies, and BET programming) to the point where the deeply pigmented bretheren are basically trapped by the phenomenon appropriately referred to as "Liberal Plantation Mentality" engendered by Democrats and their enablers in the Liberal Controlled Media. Its only virulent and quite successful goal is to keep the deeply pigmented bretheren "down," and reliant on them for their every meager scrap, none of which encourages self-reliance, bootstrap industriousness or independent thought.
Or proper speech patterns. That this news outlet reported factually the soliloquy proffered by "Edge" is only as racist as is accurate reporting on any social phenomenon. The racist element beghins and ends with the entire Liberal Plantation Mentality which nurtured it, the liberal Media which spawns it, and the deeply pigmented bretheren who are duped into believing that following meekly along behind these Machiavellian errata is somehow to their advantage. Clearly, it is not.
;-/
Very sad. Contributing factors were that she is bi-polar and they did not have a car.
The reality is, though, that relying on the government is a mistake. Sometimes, as in this case, the mistake is fatal.
True, my brother almost died from it last summer. He was in the hospital for almost two months. thanks to many prayers from freepers and others, he is doing very well now and it scared him so much he has stopped drinking because of it.
You could not possibly be more mistaken. Huckleberry Finn was a novelistic creation of a non-existent reality, created to transport its consumers to a place that exists only in the minds of those who willingly ingest its passages and accept their fallacies; just like Liberal Plantation Mentality.
;-/
>>>The poor man. What a terrible way to die.
I concur - and I’ve survived pancreatitis. Took more than a year to be able to work again.
*******************
Quite right. My dog had pancreatitis a few times. I'm pretty sure he didn't have a drinking problem.
Just like she would have every right to complain if the reporter changed her words. BTW, your example makes no sense. You are changing my words whereas the reporter quoted verbatim.
See #12.
;-/
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