A Few Minutes Now May Save a Life
My friend Kelly had an accident last year with her two year old son and one of his little friends in the car. The boys were more shaken up than anything but Kelly was badly injured.
For quite some time after the accident she was unable to give the emergency room staff any information on the children. Her purse wasn’t found for several hours after the accident. But did you know EMT's will usually load children into the ambulance safety seat and all? And on the bottom of the friend’s seat was a sticker with all of his contact information and even the fact that he was allergic to certain drugs. Information that allowed the hospital to call his parents, get Kelly’s husband’s phone number from them and start treatment for the child.
The sticker was part of a program called TIKE (Toddler Info Kept for Emergencies) developed for exactly this type of situation. If the stickers aren’t offered by your daycare, local fire, police or EMT's, you can go online and look for them, they are readily available at no cost to you.
Had Kelly’s purse gone to the hospital with her, the staff would have found her cell phone was set up with ICE (In Case of Emergency) numbers. In her phone ICE1 is her husband, Mark. But she also has ICE2 in case Mark is in the car with her. ICE2 is her brother in law Keith who has all of their information in a file. They also would have found out she is allergic to a common pain medication from a card kept in her wallet.
In the case of severe allergies, preexisting conditions and medications, consider wearing medic alert jewelry. This is not your grandmother’s clunky old bracelet any more; the tags are now incorporated in stylish jewelry. You can even get a bracelet that contains a flash drive with your medical history that looks like one of the silicone bracelets everyone is wearing these days. This alert can help emergency personnel make the best decisions regarding your care when you can’t speak for yourself.
Of course you can help protect your family further during an accident by not texting, keeping distractions like eating or phone calls to a minimum, wearing properly adjusted seat belts, having an expert check the installation of your child seats, not disabling the air bags, keeping children under 13 in the back seat, keeping arms and hands inside the car, locking doors while the car is moving and keep any heavy items either fastened down or in the trunk so that they won’t fly around the car and hit the passengers in the event of a sudden stop or crash.
Take the first step right now. Take a moment to program those numbers in your phone, you never know, it could save your life today.
