[Medical Q&A] Emergency must-read! If a family member suddenly suffers a stroke, do you know these precautions?

Author: Liu Huizhen, deputy chief physician of China Rehabilitation Research Center

Reviewer: Guo Shubin, Chief Physician, Beijing Chaoyang Hospital, Capital Medical University

If a family member suddenly suffers a stroke, keep the following things in mind!

While waiting for emergency personnel, patients can lie down, reduce activity, and avoid emotional excitement. Family members should not cry or call out to patients loudly to avoid causing psychological pressure on patients. Patients with active dentures should remove them. If patients vomit or become unconscious, they must tilt their heads to one side to prevent vomitus or secretions from being accidentally inhaled into the airway, leading to suffocation and aspiration pneumonia. If there is vomitus blocking the mouth of a comatose patient, they should try to pick it out to keep the airway open. Please note that stroke is divided into ischemic stroke and hemorrhagic stroke. The symptoms of these two diseases can be the same, but the treatment plans are different, or even opposite. We must not give patients aspirin, hemostatics and other drugs on our own to avoid aggravating the patient's condition. This is especially true for comatose patients. Putting drugs or food into the mouth of comatose patients may cause suffocation, which is fatal. If conditions permit, we can measure the patient's blood sugar and blood pressure on our own, but do not easily give patients antihypertensive drugs to avoid aggravating the degree of cerebral insufficiency. Also, do not perform invasive procedures such as bloodletting from the fingers on the patient. Otherwise, if the patient needs thrombolysis, continuous bleeding may occur during the thrombolysis process.

While waiting for the "120" ambulance, family members can also prepare the patient's medical history, commonly used medications, and if possible, find out the most recent test results. This is very important for doctors to determine whether the patient is suitable for thrombolysis. In addition, please ask family members or witnesses to remember the patient's onset time, accurate to the hour and minute, which will help emergency doctors determine the time window and develop a treatment plan.