A routine trip for groceries turned into an opportunity to help a woman in an emergency for M3 Claire Tanager.
Tanager, was shopping at a Trader Joe’s in Hyde Park on Friday, March 27, when a woman began having a medical emergency. Tanager is living in Chicago with her husband while he finishes a pathology residency at University of Chicago.
Tanager said she was standing in the checkout line when she turned around and saw a woman lying face down on the ground. Tanager said she walked over, introduced herself as a medical student and a trained first responder, and asked the woman if she remembered what happened.
Tanager said the woman seemed scared but didn’t have any apparent injuries. She took the woman’s vitals, saw her respiratory rate and looked for signs of a stroke. She said the woman was sweaty, and Tanager encouraged her to go to the emergency department to be checked for any cardiac concerns. She gave her water and waited until an ambulance arrived.
“Pretty quickly it became apparent to me she was stable and I didn’t need to intervene anymore, so I just sat with her,” Tanager said. “She wanted to know more about my life, so I told her I was a medical student and about that. I just sat with her until EMS arrived.”
Tanager, like the medical school’s other students, received training and was certified as a medical first responder during her first year at the medical school. The seven-week course qualifies students for state and national certification as medical first responders. MFR training is part of the medical school’s curriculum, which provides early exposure to the clinical setting, and the course equips students to respond when someone is ill or injured and provides instruction on basic procedures, including taking vital signs, performing CPR, bandaging and wound care, among other things.
The training continues for students after their first year with an advanced cardiac life support course along with field trainings and training in the medical school’s Simulation Center.
For Tanager, the medical first responder training was recent but the grocery store incident wasn’t the first time she has offered to help in an emergency situation. She has been the first on the scene at minor car crashes in the Kalamazoo area. She worked as a lifeguard before starting medical school and also has wilderness first responder training.
Tanager said she had always assumed she would be nervous to help in an emergency situation, but her medical first responder training gave her the confidence to know she was not going to get in over her head and the confidence to know that a medical evaluation was warranted.
“I felt comfortable in myself that I could do something, that I knew what steps to take,” Tanager said. “My training, especially in medical school, has helped me understand that something that looks as simple as fainting might be a sign of a more serious problem.”
Tanager said the experience was one she won’t forget.
“It was a really cool experience for me and she was an extremely nice lady,” Tanager said. “It’s certainly left its mark on me.”