Diagnosis: Inexperience

Anytime a crew gets dispatched for a call involving a Pediatric patient I think there is always an element of apprehension. One of the things that you are taught in emergency medicine is that kids are not "little adults". They can not be treated the same way because their body systems are so much different than that of an adult. Children are very resilient, which is a good thing, but they also have a tendency to compensate for a very long time and then crash all at once when you are least expecting it. My crew and I responded to a call for a three month old male that was having a seizure. We arrived to find a young mother standing outside of her residence holding her little baby. Naturally, we were all a bit nervous because we just don't see as many children in the back of the medic unit as we do adults. After we had checked the baby and were on the way to the hospital we came to the assumption that the baby had a seizure only because the fever had gotten so high. An experienced mother would have probably recognized this, but this young mother had no idea. We took the baby to the hospital and on the way I got the opportunity to "educate" this young mother on some things involving medical emergencies in children. Being able to teach and be able to prevent future emergencies is one of my favorite things to do!