The price of love
SCOTT’S STORY
Romantic Brits spend £129 on going on a date – twice as much as couples in Italy and France, a study found. The total includes travel, clothes, food and drink. A HERO paramedic saved a woman’s life after she suffered a massive heart attack on board a flight from Tenerife.
Scott McKeating was returning home from holiday when there was a call for medical assistance on the plane and he volunteered to help.
A passenger had become unwell with high sugar levels and was not responding to her normal dose of insulin.
Without his usual medical equipment, Scott, 27, improvised by using the patient’s own blood glucose monitoring kit and identified that she was hyperglycaemic and in a serious condition. He requested the plane make an emergency landing.
However, the lady then went into cardiac arrest and with no defibrillator on board, Scott began manual CPR.
Scott, from Bathgate, West Lothian, said: “I could see that she was seriously ill. Her diabetes was not treated properly and her blood glucose levels were extremely high.
“She stopped breathing and went into cardiac arrest. I just went into automatic pilot and started doing CPR on her, something I’ve done several times over almost four years with the service.
“Six minutes of full-on CPR is pretty tiring but I refused to stop until there was a sign of life.”
As the plane prepared to make an emergency landing, Scott managed to get the patient breathing on her own.
He added: “It was very delicate situation and I was worried she would have another heart attack. She was very weak but paramedics were waiting on the ground to rush her into hospital where surgeons performed a quadruple heart bypass.
“It wasn’t quite the end to my holiday that I had in my mind but as far as I’m concerned, it’s what I’ve been trained to do, she was my patient and I’m just glad that she survived.”
Pauline Howie, CEO of the Scottish Ambulance Service, praised Scott’s leadership in a critical situation.
She said: “This must have been a most stressful situation given the lack of medical equipment to hand and the simple fact of where they were, but Scott’s actions embody the professionalism and dedication of our staff, on or off-duty. He is a tribute to the service.”