VIDEO: A San Antonio Fire Department program is now the gold standard across the country, making whole blood available on ambulances and at trauma scenes.
Three years ago, San Antonio mom Tiffany Kieschnick was driving to the store to get her son iced tea.
“I ended up having a stroke on my way home, and I flipped my car into a ditch and coded in the car. The paramedics actually said that they were shocked when I came back to life,” she said.
San Antonio EMS had just begun carrying whole blood to trauma scenes to allow for immediate transfusions.
“Had they not had whole blood on that ambulance, I was not going to make it,” she said.
Kieschnick was the first patient to receive whole blood in the field, not just in San Antonio but in the nation. That’s because SAFD created the program in late 2018.