re: Air lifted to hospital

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Neighbor killed his wife then put a bullet in his head in my front yard about a decade ago - Acadian sent the chopper out and landed it on the property.

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So the wife was dead, the husband put a bullet in his head…why would they send a chopper? Not like anyone was in a hurry at that point.

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So the wife was dead, the husband put a bullet in his head…why would they send a chopper? Not like anyone was in a hurry at that point.

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Depends if the husband had a pulse (I assume the wife was given a time of death on scene), if he did, I can see Acadian's rationale.
Medical necessity and time/distance to appropriate facility are the two determining factors in calling in air support.

Just how fricking dumb are you?

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was at the airshow in Lafayette when Joe Hartung was killed, Acadian fired up the chopper on the PHI ramp and flew to the crash at midfield, as soon as it landed the pilot shut the engines down, he was gone

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Damn... at that point it depends on Acadian'ss protocol to continue to fly him out being it was a witnessed arrest.

The probability if of survival is < 1% with a traumatic arrest.

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II guess you have to be important.

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Nah. Not at all.

My Pops would have been airlifted due to a heart attack. He got to the first hospital (the closest) via an ambulance. From there they were going to transfer him to another hospital where the heart center was. They wanted to Med-Flight him, but the helicopter was already in route to another case. He went by ambulance, and was okay. They had stabilized him at the first hospital.

In the grand scheme of things, Pops would not have been considered "important".

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I thought it was odd because only a doc can officially declare someone dead and it is such a short to Lafayette General but as soon as the skids touched down and the cool down period was over he shut them down, maybe decapitated or head turned around?

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Each EMS service has its own protocol, and they often vary. TOD can be called from the scene if it's a traumatic CPR / injuries not sustainable for life and patient is in asystole in a minimum of 3 leads. The medic calls medical control (physician) and TOD is given. Each case is different however, witnessed arrest, how long patient has been in arrest, age, etc.

I have a family who are close friends. They had two air lifts inside of 12 months. One for a son when he was around 14 (fell hanging lights in the barn) and one for the mom (was hit while jogging on a gravel road). The mom was hit by a different son.

It isn’t as rare in more rural areas. Has nothing to do with how important someone is or isn’t.

Not since Iraq. When Medevac would spin up as soon as the got on frequency they were moving and would tell you where they were going, as a controller you moved everyone out of their way. To make it more fun when controlling at night with NVGs and the only way you can see aircraft is the strobe on the back,but you have no depth perception. So nights where you had C-17s, C-130s, C-23, RC 12s, 737s coming in and out with landing and departing opposite directions because the city was around the northern part of the airfield. Throw in 160th and other aircraft going on missions then a Medevac has to go out. shite would get hairy quick you have to ensure when they move traffic is called and the pilots are where they told you they were. Those guys are good though, they don't frick around and they are pretty sharp with instruction and calls.

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II guess you have to be important.

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Seeing as this is the OT, misspelling and assumption is par for the course...but it's based on the severity of injury, just to be clear.

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Has anyone or someone you know that’s been air lifted to a hospital?

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I have been. I was in Marble Falls, TX about an hour and a half outside of Austin and had a horseback riding accident. Traumatic dislocation of my ankle (bottom of my foot was looking up at me) and broke both the bones in my lower leg just above the ankle, with the fibula protruding from the skin. (so a compound fracture) Due to the remote location, the onsite nurse (me and the wife were at a recreational church camp) assessed that I needed to be airlifted. A local ambulance came and got me from where I was over to the football field where the chopper landed. The flight time into Austin to the UT hospital was only maybe 20 minutes.

I'll never forget riding in that chopper with no ear-covering headphones like the crew has. That thing was rattling, squeaking, and vibrating like it was about to throw itself apart at any second. Very unnerving.

I like seeing University of Texas sports mired in eternal mediocrity, but I gotta say those surgeons did a bang up job on my leg. I completely tore 3 ligaments on the outside of my ankle that connect your foot to your leg, plus the aforementioned damage. They certainly put humpty dumpty back together.

As far as cost, we got a bill from it that before the insurance adjustments, I want to say was pretty close to $30k - and that was in 2006. Thankfully we had good private health insurance and the camp's insurance picked up as secondary after our primary insurance did their part. All told, the expedition was in the range of $90k and we didn't pay hardly a bit of it. Our only cost (apart from copays and prescriptions, etc) was $1000 for the ambulance that came and got me, stabilized me, and transported me to the football field.

It pays to have good insurance, even if it feels like a scam sometimes. Now, we also carry medical transportation insurance - because of having been there. Sorta like having a house that's not in a flood zone but carrying flood insurance anyway. If you lived in or had close family or friends that were flooded in BTR in 2016 or Houston in 2017, that $500ish dollars a year is worth it to not have to go through that without insurance.