ANTIGO — At the beginning of Wednesday night’s city council meeting, Antigo Fire Chief Corey Smith awarded commendations to several first responders in his department for saving a patient’s life during a recent transport.
Paramedics Laura Palmer and Brian Baginski, as well as EMT Matthew Sitte, received commendations for saving the life of a man that suffered a cardiac arrest while they were transporting him from Aspirus Langlade Hospital to Aspirus Wausau.
“Due to your crew’s adherence to our protocols, stellar patient care, and quick thinking, the patient was quickly defibrillated, ultimately saving his life,” Smith said at the meeting. “I would like to commend you for your actions on that call. None of the actions that occur on an EMS call happen without teamwork, and your contribution to the team was integral in the positive outcome of that call.”
Smith said earlier that night, his department’s ambulance had taken the man to Aspirus Langlade Hospital, but there, he developed a STEMI — short for ST-elevated myocardial infarction, essentially a serious coronary blockage — which required him to be transported to Aspirus Wausau’s cardiac catheterization lab (cath lab).
“What happens is there’s a coronary artery that ends up getting blocked somewhere in the heart that results in this unusual heart rhythm,” Smith said. “Depending on where it is affects where we see it on our EKG. So we read the EKG, we identify that ST-elevation, and then we take them to Wausau Hospital, where they use their own EKG to identify where the vessel is that’s blocked, and then they go in and clear that blockage up. It is a very severe heart attack, but it’s also correctable if we can get it in time.”
Smith said Palmer was the primary paramedic in the back of the ambulance with the patient. Sitte, meanwhile, had been hired by the department just one week prior to the incident.
“Her ability to recognize that that patient went into cardiac arrest was the key,” Smith said. “The support that Matthew, the ability to help her out — and he was really new at that time — the ability to follow commands and follow orders and do what she asked of him was as well. But primarily, she’s got to know the signs of an impending cardiac arrest, and to be prepared for whatever happens, so that was the case. She noticed it before it really took hold.”
Palmer and Sitte both described the “save” as memorable.
“It was a huge high for me,” Palmer said. “It was my first time in the back as a medic for something like that and I freaked out for a second, but then I got it together. But those are the moments that make all the really bad calls that we go to worth it in the end. We were on a high the rest of that day.”
“It’s a rare thing to get,” Sitte said. “For me, because I’m so new, that was my first save, so just to get that first one, it feels great.”
Smith said though providing care during transports is common, actually being required to provide a last-ditch, life-saving measure like a defibrillator shock is not.
“Most of the time, you’re giving patients other medications to help stabilize the heart and help their symptoms out, so most of the time, we don’t have to do that on these transports,” Smith said. “Part of the protocols that we have in place for those types of transports is that you be prepared for the worst case scenario, because they are a severe patient. That preparation of being ready for that moment, they hope it doesn’t happen, but being ready for it is very important. You can look at it and say, ‘That’s their job. They’re paramedics and EMTs. Their job is to save people’s lives.’ But I feel recognition’s important for people that do their job at an exemplary level, and this is one of those cases.”
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