As optical professionals, you have patients and customers in front of you all day. But will you be prepared when something out of the ordinary happens—like a life threatening medical emergency?
It happened to Dale Thompson, licensed optician and owner of Precise Eyewear Frame Repair in Cincinnati. He specializes in frame repair and vintage eyewear restoration, as well as filling Rx’s.
He was taking care of a customer when that customer had a sudden—and severe—heart attack.
“He was sitting in front of me talking, and he just ‘died,’” Thompson recalls. “He had no respiration. He had no heartbeat.”
As the man gasped for breath and as his wife looked on in horror, Thompson called 911, and started giving him CPR—what he could remember of CPR, anyway. He hadn’t taken a CPR course since 1987, when it was required as part of his job as supervisor of a frame manufacturing facility.
“I was little rusty with it, but I knew the gist of what to do,” he says. It apparently was enough to keep the man in a state in which he could be revived by the EMTs.
“I was really glad to see them show up,” Thompson says with a laugh.
The end of this story, however, is a happy one.
After being in ICU for two weeks, the customer made a complete recovery.
“His wife came back in with treats for me, and for the EMTs,” Thompson says.
Thompson’s experience is a dire reminder that those in the industry—whether it’s on the retail floor or as a practioner in the exam room—need to be prepared for all sorts of emergencies that can happen with patients. That includes health emergencies as well as accidental falls or other injuries.
Thompson suggests that someone in each office have a working knowledge of basic First Aid and know CPR. It’s not a bad idea to use part of a staff meeting once in a while to go over what to do in the event of certain types of emergencies—because emergencies are never expected, and your staff can mean the difference between a happy ending and a tragic ending.
“I would never have thought that would happen in my shop in a million years,” Thompson says. But he’s glad he knew what to do.
“[Customers] are my responsibility, as long as they are in my business,” he says.