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“What’s wrong with this young woman?” the emergency medical technician student asked the paramedic working with her. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” she added as she stared at the unconscious young waitress. The patient’s face was bright red in color and her heart rate was over 150 beats per minute. Her mouth and lips were dry and her pupils were fixed and dilated. “She looks like she’s gonna die or something. Is she?” Fear etched the student’s face.
The paramedic scratched his head. “Don’t know, but she can’t feel anything. I think she’s paralyzed. Watch this,” he said as he scratched a pin across the waitress’s foot. “See, she has no response so she must have some kind of paralysis,” he added.
The student gawked and nodded. “Yeah, if you ran that pin across my foot, I’d be kicking you by now. But, what’s wrong? Look at her pupils. They’re huge, and they don’t react to light,” the student said as she used her penlight to check the young woman’s pupil response. “I thought that meant brain injury or something.”
The paramedic shined his penlight into the girls eyes, “Yeah, they are. She’s must have some neurological involvement. The restaurant staff said she’d had a massive seizure so that could have caused some brain damage. What did the maître d’ tell you?”
“He said she lost her balance and fell carrying a tray loaded with food. That’s about it,” she said with a shrug of her shoulders.
“If that’s the case, she must have hit her head on the floor. What’s our ETA?” the paramedic asked the driver.
“We’re five minutes out,” the driver said. “Here, talk to the emergency doctor. He’s on the line now,” he said as he passed the phone back to the paramedic.