At the Emergency Room
Story B:
"Heads up, everyone," says the paramedic as he wheels in a man on a gurney. Another paramedic is trying to pump air into the patient's mouth. As you rush over to meet him, the doors burst open again. A second patient is wheeled in, this time a woman. You rush to help the first patient, while another doctor looks after the second.
The paramedic tells you that both of the patients were on a fishing trip off the coast of Key West, Florida. The two passengers got sick about 45 minutes after eating. They reported headaches, a numbness in the mouth, and difficulty breathing.
A third passenger did not eat and did not get sick. He used the boat's radio to call for help and piloted the yacht back to shore. The ambulance met them at the dock. About five minutes before they reached the hospital, the sick man stopped breathing, so they tried pumping air into his lungs.
You get your patient onto a ventilator to help him breathe, then go to the waiting room to question the third member of the boating trip, Ramon. He is calm, but obviously worried about his two friends.
"Well," he begins, "Ivy, Joe, and I headed out about 10 A.M. to fish for amberjack and barracuda. Actually, only Ivy and I were fishing. Joe's an old friend visiting from Alaska. He's a chef at a French restaurant, so he volunteered to cook us his specialty, a mussel and clam stew. He was cooking all day.
"We didn't have much luck until about 3 o'clock, when Ivy hooked a mean barracuda. She was fighting that thing for over an hour. At 4:30, after she landed her fish, we were about to eat, but then I see the time. It's going to take us at least an hour and a half to get back to the docks and I don't want to pilot in the dark. So I volunteer to pilot the boat back for 45 minutes, then Ivy will take over, and I'll get to eat.
"So, I'm at the helm and at the end of my shift when I see Ivy stumbling towards me, as if she were drunk. At first I'm mad, because if she was drunk, she couldn't pilot the yacht, and I was dying to eat some of that stew. But she tells me Joe needs help. He's having trouble breathing, she says.
"So I stop the boat and start walking to where Joe is. Ivy is leaning on me because she is having trouble walking. Joe is not breathing well and I can see Ivy is not in the best of shape, either. She tells me she has a tingling in her mouth and it's spreading to her throat, but she's speaking incoherently and I can't really understand what else she's trying to tell me. I'm thinking it's some kind of food poisoning, so I call for help. They told me to head for harbor as soon as possible."
You ask Ramon if any of the fish they caught went into the stew. He says they were just sport fishing so they released the barracuda as soon as Ivy got a photo of it. Joe harvested the mussels and clams himself, fresh from the sea in Alaska.
