To drink drive my neighbour to hospital?

[hanette]

So, had 2x 25 CL glasses of wine in pub w DH. He goes on to meet friend, I go to put D teenagers to bed.

Knock at door 11.10pm, neighbour asking me to take to A and E in car due to plummeting blood pressure and severe pains in left arm

I did - adrenaline kicked in - I tried to persuade them to call an ambulance or wait for my DH but they were so distressed I just took them in my car

Am shocked - am a rubbish driver anyway and have never driven after more than one glass of wine

So - was I over the limit? I had a plate of salmon and veg for din. And also WWTD?

Am shocked at myself and how I deffo felt different (less safe) behind the wheel.

I have no idea how big a 25cl glass of wine is. I thought that was a spirit size measure?

Who cares?

The OP has admitted she definitely felt different and less safe behind the wheel.

Therefore lives could very well have been put at risk no matter what the measure.

Do you drink to that level every night? If so your too drunk to make sensible decisions, I hope your dh is not drunk every night too.

I think your heart is in a good place, you probably need to look at your relationship with booze op.

Medic here - and I am not going to berate you for the drink driving... it has been beaten to death.

Here is why you should have called an ambulance...

What you described sounds cardiovascular - very much so. If your neighbour had deteriorated on the road... lost consciousness or worse - you would have either had to drive on not knowing her condition, or pull over and wait for an ambulance to meet you and take over.

That is very much lost time in the "golden hour" - the time from onset of symptoms until "clot-busters" can be administered to break up a clot in the coronary arteries and lessen/reverse the damage form a heart attack...

If you had called the ambulance from your home - no drink driving, but more importantly if she deteriorated before arriving at the hospital, she would have been assessed, symptom relief can be administered, life support initiated if necessary, and the receiving team would be ready to accept her and take over care.

It is honourable that you wanted to help, but from the other side, 999 is there for a reason.

A 25cl glass of wine is 250ml, so you had had 500ml of wine i.e. 2/3 rds of a bottle. So, yes you were well over the limit.

Low BP and pain in left arm sounds like a myocardial infarction (heart attack), so she would have been better in an ambulance as they could start treating her straight away.

So, pretty stupid and very unreasonable.

hanette what a lovely neighbour you are! Bless you, and I hope you are feeling okay after this horrible experience.

Clearly YWBU to drive when you suspected you were over the limit, but... what a difficult situation to be dealing with!

Hope your neighbour is okay. Glad nobody got hurt because of the (possibly bad) decision you made. It ws a difficult call for you, but thankfully it worked out alright and your heart was in the right place.

Having said that, being sober is no guarantee of not being an utter cock, on the roads or off. Needs must, OP

Errm...no.

Needs really mustn't if you feel (as the OP did) under the influence of alcohol that makes an already bad driver, feel less safe behind the wheel.

Simply saying 'Oh well, there are sober cocks on and off the roads too', would be of no comfort to a grieving relative.

You do realise you drank 2/3 of a bottle of wine? You should have phoned an ambulance. If your dc had been younger you would have had no choice but to, and tbh drinking that much should have also been an absolute barrier to you driving as well.

wtf is that meant to mean, deepsage?

She's drunk in charge of children, if an emergency occurred with her dc she obviously was incapable of making wise decisions.

Deepfriedsage Fri 15-Nov-13 00:29:42

To quote you;

"Do you drink to that level every night? If so your too drunk to make sensible decisions, I hope your dh is not drunk every night too.

I think your heart is in a good place, you probably need to look at your relationship with booze op".

Bloody hell! That was harsh. The OP made a quick decision and now you have marked her and her Dh as problem drinkers!

Deep, she wasn't necessarily drunk!! Just too much to drive. And her children are teenagers.

deepfriedsage being over the limit to drive and actually too drunk to look after your children, are miles apart.

Considering 2 glasses of wine can make you over the legal driving limit.

The OP's capability to make wise decisions would depend entirely upon how used to drinking a couple of glasses of wine, that she actually is.

You can not automatically compare that with being over the legal drink drive limit.

50cl of wine, oh is a bottle 70cl? (talking to myself here). Yeh that's a fair bit and you definitely shouldn't have. You could and should have ordered a taxi or an ambulance or asked another sober neighbour to do it.

Anyway, thank goodness nothing went wrong and hope the neighbour recovers.

But if you'd crashed, or someone crashed into you and you'd been caught, there'd be no, absolutely no mitigating circumstances in court and you would have been banged up all night and attended court the next morning.

It's silly, stupid even, and you're right for berating yourself.

Does she need to look at her relationship with booze because she had a couple of glasses of wine one night deep ?

Drink driving was clearly the wrong thing to do, but a couple of glasses of wine is perfectly normal and acceptable, I think you may be projecting your own issues on the op there.

BeeMom speaks truth. For anybody reading this, please call an ambulance if you are not sure.

My aunt once drove a colleague to hospital when she was suffering an allergic reaction to a cake she had eaten. They got stuck in traffic and her colleague nearly died. The paramedics phoned my aunt the next day tell her that she should have called an ambulance.

Op, I don't want to criticise you because you are a lucky neighbour. But for anybody else reading this - call an ambulance!!

Aren't wine bottles 750ml/75cl if they're the standard size?

Which means that the OP had 2/3rds of a bottle of wine... Which is probably a better way of thinking about it than thinking that you've had 2 glasses... Although you haven't said exactly how long before you drove you had that amount to drink so it might not have been quite that much if you'd been tested. There again, the fact you felt unsafe says a lot too!

And although your heart was in the right place, worrying about distressed neighbour, the fact that they were distressed means that weren't in a place to be thinking about you or the fact you were technically drunk or the fact that if the police had stopped you, you would have lost your license, or you were at much higher risk of having an accident and the potential for so many different bad outcomes for you (or indeed others if you'd been involved in an accident) - they were only thinking of themselves (understandable in their situation), but you needed to pick up the phone and say that you thought your neighbour was having a heart attack and get the ambulance there asap. Sorry. But you did. And if the worst happened to your neighbour in the mean time then you would be on a different mumsnet thread saying OMG I should have driven even though I was drunk shouldn't I.

You were in a horrible lose-lose situation - and if you had been caught I would have hoped that you would have been dealt with sympathetically because your case is different from somebody who has driven to the pub, had a load to drink and then driven home afterwards. But you still did wrong.

And once you got your neighbour to hospital given the timescales, it appears that you drove home again. You should maybe have waited it out at the hospital until you were clear to drive again.

At Halfords etc you can now get little breathalysers as they are compulsory to have in the car when in France. Maybe it is worth getting a pack so that if this scenario ever happens again, you blow into one and show that you can't drive - end of. It's scary waiting for an ambulance when somebody is potentially seriously ill - but no more scary than having a fatal or disabling accident on the way to hospital!

This is one sanctimonious thread! Not only should OP not have driven after having 2/3 a bottle of wine (true - but moot as she is now home without incident), but now it seems she was also too drunk to sit in her front room with the DC upstairs asleep. Jeeez.

OP, finish off the bottle now and go to sleep!

Lucky neighbour??? I mean very lovely neighbour

You shouldn't have done it, you know that, but at the time you were worried and just wanted to help.
Remember, it's just not worth driving after even any alcohol, but don't beat yourself up.

Eightandthreequarters

Good post.

The benefit of calling 999, I think is that not only will they send out an ambulance, but they can get information from you so that the paramedics know what they are about to deal with (and they can let the hospital know what the person will need when they arrive), and can direct you to give first aid if possible while waiting for the ambulance to get there.

I think an ambulance is the best option in a scenario like this. If it seems a lot less urgent then a taxi, or call the non emergency line for advice.

I hope your neighbour is okay and get yourself something to eat and something (without alcohol) to drink to ground yourself, you've had a shock. Drink driving is really dangerous, I'm sure (from your reaction) you won't be doing it in future. You might want to get yourself some smaller wine glasses as recommended by Drink Aware so that you have a clearer idea of how much you're drinking.

eightandthreequarters I beg to differ. It is not "moot" that OP drove after drinking half a litre of wine (500ml, 2/3 bottle - however you want to quantify the volume) because she is home without incident. It was a bloody silly thing to do.

OP - ambulance. Because it sounds like your neighbour was having a heart attack, or at the very least severe angina. Ambulances have oxygen, emergency medication and defibrillators on board with trained personnel, all of which may have been needed.

For anyone else reading - if any friends or neighbours have these symptoms, it's a 999 call. While you're waiting, stick 300mg aspirin in their mouths if they aren't allergic to it.

If you have any doubt about your safety to drive, don't.

But that is a side issue. In a medical emergency call an ambulance. They can give initial treatment, which you can't. And an ambulance is a 'safe' environment, equipped with the full gamut of resuscitation equipment and folk who can operate it. Your car is not.

And at the risk of descending into a rant:

Ambulances contain ECG machines which transmit directly to the nearest coronary care unit. A specialist will look at the ECG and if they are concerned the patient will bypass A&E and be taken directly CCU where there will be a team waiting for them.

This is a situation vastly better left to the professionals, there really is no place for well-intentioned heroics, sober or not.

You had 500ml of wine. That's six units if it was 12% wine, more units if it was stronger.

So six units, say. If you started drinking at 7pm then by 11pm four of those units will have been processed by your body. (On average, one unit per hour). So at that point you'd still have two units - equivalent of having just drunk a smaller glass of wine.

You might not have been over the limit. Depends on timings, your body chemistry, the amount you ate. Etc.

Put it behind you. You got the neighbour to hospital safely, and I'm sure they are very grateful (though from what I have just read on this thread calling an ambulance would have been better for your neighbour, because of the equipment and expertise).