Reply #123: They may have been doing you a favor!

[Saving Hawaii]

;-)

In some parts of this country (Seattle comes to mind) the fire department has a better SCA (sudden cardiac arrest) save rate than the hospitals do. It would be more advantageous to collapse just outside of the hospital and have the firefighters treat you than to have the doctors and nurses inside do that work. Some fire departments consider CPR (and the paramedic portion too) to be butter and bread stuff and they treat it very seriously and are good at it. They practice a lot more than hospital staff do and some have quite a bit more experience. They tend to do resuscitations pretty well.

Those departments are exceptions to the rule though... usually I'd bet my money on the hospital staff. But there are a few that are very good. (Seattle Fire is somewhere around a 50% save rate... most other fire departments are around 5%.)