Tonight, as I was doing my nightly scan of online articles to see if Obama had won the Wisconsin and Hawaii primaries, an article caught my eye on msnbc.com. The title of the article was "Hospital's 'Code blue' most deadly at night". The reason it caught my eye was because I went into cardiac arrest in the hospital after the birth of my daughter Karina, and a Code blue was called, at night. I was interested in what the article had to say.
Apparently, they define night time to be after 11 PM. (I went into cardiac arrest sometime between 6:30 and 8:00 PM and my anesthesiologist was in the room when it happened, so resuscitation began immediately.) Graveyard shift tends to be less staffed and when someone goes into cardiac arrest, hospital employees may not be paying as much attention in the middle of the night as during the day. But what really caught my eye is this statistic: 80 to 85 percent of people who go into cardiac arrest in the hospital DIE IN THE HOSPITAL. Only 20 percent of people who go into cardiac arrest during daytime hours survive. Only 15 percent who go into cardiac arrest in the middle of the night survive.
These statistics again remind me how lucky I am to be here.
