Friday, we attended Sarah's graduation from medical school in Chicago! She will be doing a residency in Emergency Medicine in Chicago starting next month. Zach is postponing graduation, doing research in pyschiatry, with the plan to start residency in psychiatry next year.
She got to help take care of her first emergency patient on Sunday morning! Sarah, Ben, Mia and I (Allen) went out for a chilly, breezy (it is the Windy City after all!) run on the waterfront before church. On the way home, we saw a man slump forward in his wheelchair on the sidewalk. We stopped and approached him, "Sir! Are you okay?" He didn't respond more than an agonized breath. We flagged down a police car which stopped. "Do you have Narcan®?" Sarah asked. "No, we're coming back from a parade." "I need to start carrying Narcan," Sarah remarked. A policeman looked in the man's pocket and pulled out a little ziplock bag with a cut off straw in it. "What's that?" I asked naively. "They snort heroin out of these little baggies." The man's breathing was really slow, depressed by the heroin, just taking 2 or 3 per minute. Fortunately, after about 5 minutes, a policeman with Narcan arrived and gave the man a squirt in the nostril. "This will amaze you," I told Ben who was watching the whole event. Narcan (Naloxone) is a drug that blocks the receptors that opiods like heroin activate. If you block the receptor, the drugs lose their effect. In 30 seconds the man suddenly came to life, moving around and agitated, and most importantly, breathing!
Later, on our way to Ben's house near Taylorville, IL, we stopped to buy some gas and the gas station had a box of Narcan nasal spray, freely provided by the Illinois government for anyone who wanted it. We each took one.
