Get Out of the Way

If you see and hear an ambulance with its siren on, please get out of the way. 

A siren means that there is an unstable patient that is being transported for emergency care, and it is every person's civic duty to clear the road to their best of ability to ensure that time is not wasted.

Today I had the stressful experience of transferring a pediatric patient who was having seizures, and at a point in the transfer his oxygenation dropped. 

Imagine being the health staff, trying your best to resuscitate a patient in a shaky ambulance as it tries to weave its way through the traffic, trying to keep your balance the same time as a hundred and one things run through your head. Imagine watching in trepidation as the oxygenation worsens and having to prepare to intubate in the ambulance as the patient deteriorates.

Then imagine the feeling of looking out of the ambulance and seeing a traffic jam, in addition to realizing how drivers are taking their own sweet time making a path for the ambulance to go through, to the extent that the driver having to make an announcement so the cars in front of him would actually move.

Imagine being the mother in the ambulance, seeing her child go through a situation like that.

Imagine the feeling of the doctor, or the nurse, or the medical assistant in that ambulance, knowing that every second counts - and that potentially this could have been a case of life and death.

Please have some civic consciousness.

An ambulance siren is a serious situation, one where every second could mean a difference between life or death.

Please get out of the way.