Medical Emergencies Caught On Live TV

- Live TV means you can't plan for what's about to happen.

And sometimes there's some serious medical surprises.

Let's watch it together.

Be whoop.

- [Announcer] It looks like Ruben is in the lead

and here it goes.

- Oh, wipe out.

Whoa!

That could be a knee injury,

an ankle injury and a head injury and a broken rib

all in one.

- Riverside Park, Rob Black, Global News.

- Great sign off, though.

The fall was so bad it reminds me

of Johnny Knoxville's thing with the bull.

- It's time for our How you Doing Halloween Costume Contest.

We do it every year.

It's always a lot of fun.

Let's get started.

Our first (indistinct).

- Oh, oh!

(woman gasping)

- Oh!

- [Announcer] The show cut to black

and went to an extra long commercial break.

But when it did come back on, Wendy was back up.

- That was not a stunt.

I'm overheated in my costume and I did pass out,

but, you know what?

I'm a champ and I'm back.

- Get evaluated.

Overheating is a real issue.

Dehydrating is a real issue.

Heat stroke is a real issue and it shouldn't be,

oh, I just had a heat stroke, I fainted,

I'm good to go now.

That's not how it works.

Okay.

A little dancing, a little dancing!

My dance moves are just as good as this.

(dance music)

- Yeah.

- What can go wrong medically here?

- You okay?

- Think someone got hurt.

- [Dancer] My knee, my knee snapped.

- Usually when patients describe a knee snapping

they mean the knee gave out.

Most commonly this can happen with a meniscus or an ACL.

Sometimes a PCL injury if there's some kind

of weird collision that happened.

- I didn't fall.

- I was catching her weight.

- Oh, I see what happened.

Okay.

So there's potential for a meniscus injury there

as well as an MCL injury.

At that moment, if you have a tear of that ligament

you're just gonna get so much swelling and bruising.

He's gonna get an x-ray

to make sure that no bones are broken.

He's gonna get some crutches.

He's gonna get follow up, get an MRI.

Find out that the medial meniscus and the MCL are torn.

Potentially either do rehab and/or surgery.

And will be back on his feet dancing his little heart away.

(tense music)

- The problem is...

(woman crashing)

- Oh!

I did not expect a face first plummet like that.

Call for help.

First thing that we do, call for help

before even investigating.

And the microphone's still in her hand.

The first thing you want to know is making sure

that the person is conscious.

Are they breathing?

Do they have a pulse?

Remember if there's no pulse, you call 9-1-1

and you start those chest compressions,

chest compressions chest compressions.

But it looks like she's kind of with it.

So my prediction here and suspicion, is that she had

something known as a vasovagal syncopal episode,

where, because of nerves, because of extreme tension

her blood vessels dilated, her heart rate dropped,

and as a result she wasn't bringing enough circulation

to her brain.

And she collapsed.

This is very dangerous,

not because of the actual situation that's happening

with the low blood pressure.

But the fall, the fall is the dangerous part.

She fell face first.

- [EMT] So Karen, can you hear me?

- As an EMT, you're really in a bad spot

because you have no idea what just happened.

The person isn't talking.

You're trying to get information.

You don't know,

does this person have underlying medical conditions?

So for their role,

the most important thing is stabilizing the patient

getting them to an area

where they can receive adequate care.

(siren blaring)

She was treated for dehydration and released

from the hospital.

She will return for the showstopper round.

Okay, so dehydration can precipitate a vasovagal episode

but it could also cause a fainting episode all on its own.

Because what happens is if you're dehydrated,

meaning you haven't consumed enough beverages,

you don't have water content.

You actually lose a little bit of blood volume.

And when that happens

you can't generate enough pressure

to bring the oxygenated blood to where it needs to go,

like the brain and the vital organs,

especially when you're standing.

And as a result, with this blood pressure drop,

you actually just faint as a lifesaving mechanism.

Your brain wants you to go flat

because when you're flat,

the lower blood pressure can still circulate

the oxygenated blood throughout your body.

Correcting dehydration

in a severely dehydrated individual is also very important

and needs to be done carefully.

'Cause if you rehydrate too quickly

with the incorrect type of fluids,

you can actually cause swelling in the brain

and cause a patient to die that way.

There's a lot of things that need to be taken

into account here.

(piano playing)

- Ooh, she looks stressed.

- [Panelist] She okay?

- [2nd Panelist] You okay?

(people talking excitedly)

- Is she gonna throw up?

- Okay?

- Again, very difficult to figure out what's going on.

I like this position.

It makes it easier for the blood to return back

to the heart and go up to the brain.

- Makayla has condition that's pretty rare.

- In seventh grade, I was diagnosed with Vasovagal Syncope.

- That is not a rare condition.

Now maybe in individuals

who it happens to quite often is a rare condition.

There's two mechanisms at play during this type of syncope.

One is increased parasympathetic nerve output,

meaning that we're increasing

that rest-digest mechanism nervous system in your body

that opens up blood vessels,

which is good when you're lying down and relaxed.

Not good when you're trying to perform physically

on stage because it drops your blood pressure

therefore not bringing oxygenated blood to the brain.

And then at the same time it shuts down

sympathetic nerve firing.

So think about this, the blood vessels in your legs expand.

So blood pressure drops.

Now, if your heart was allowed to sympathetically respond

it would increase its cardiac output

by beating faster.

As a result, you would be okay.

You wouldn't even feel that something's going on.

But because you're shutting down the sympathetic

and overdriving the parasympathetic

you're creating a really bad dis-imbalance

that causes someone to faint

and potentially really hurt themselves.

- Well, a very, very heavy, heavy rotation tonight.

We had a very dare darison bite.

Let's go hit terace tazen is in pavet that hamen pet.

- Do we know what happened here?

Look like potential stroke.

- [Man Offscreen] She claims it was a migraine.

- There are types of migraines that could present

with neurologic symptoms known as complex migraines.

I would want a full workup

to see if there was in fact a stroke.

Now in young, otherwise healthy people

sometimes the cause of a stroke could happen

as a result of a PFO

that generally people don't know about that they have.

But as a result,

if you ever have a blood clot in your leg

and it starts traveling to your heart

it can transfer, instead of going into your lungs,

into the left side of your heart, through that hole.

And then as a result gets shot up

to the brain leading to a stroke.

- This is me 10 years ago.

- Dan Harris

I've read this book where he talks about this very moment.

- Researchers report people who take

cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins

for at least five years

may also lower their risk for cancer,

but it's too early to prescribe statins

slowly for cancer production.

- [Dan Offscreen] At this point, I realize I'm helpless.

So I bail right in the middle.

- Back to you.

- [Announcer] We're gonna go back now to Robin and Charlie.

- [Dan Offscreen] I knew with rock solid certainty

that I had just had a panic attack on national television.

- Panic attacks are a real phenomenon.

And people think that they're all in their heads.

Panic attacks may start in the mind,

but they continue out to the rest of your body,

which means that you feel like your heart is racing

a million miles an hour.

You can't take a deep breath.

There's an impending feeling of doom.

You feel weak, you feel numbness, tingling.

That's why so many people will describe it

as a near heart attack episode.

And sometimes we do wanna rule out a heart attack.

- To spend years in war zones

where I covered the heroics of our men and women overseas

and got a real taste of both the horror and the adrenaline

of combat after years of always barreling forward.

When I finally slowed down,

it was as if my mind revolted and I got depressed.

And so in my free time,

I briefly, but stupidly began self-medicating

and it was those recreational drugs,

my doctor would later tell me,

that almost certainly produced the on-air panic attack.

- I wouldn't say it's necessarily those drugs

that caused it.

It could have indirectly caused it

by increasing the feelings of anxiety

because a lot of people will take feel good drugs

when they're depressed.

And as a result, those feel good drugs will mess

with your neurotransmitters

leading to higher highs but also lower lows.

And as a result, withdrawal symptoms

that can make it feel like you're having a panic attack

or make it feel much worse.

So much so that it could disrupt you in your place of work.

I do recommend you read Dan Harris's "10% Happier".

Check it out on Audible, my partner.

- Stuff went wrong during my own live event.

My tour, my Alive Tour,

click here to check out everything that went wrong.

As always, stay happy and sorry for the haircut.