u/DedicatedtoDistance

Location: Portland, OR

TL;DR Would it be legal to deploy a <4ft long baton with a flag on the end of it when I am running in a cross walk and a car is coming?

Background: I love running and training. I often enjoy running hard workouts and prefer the bike paths around the river to the track. The one big down fall of these paths is that they have a couple of crossings for road. However, each of these crossings is well marked as a cross walk with several yellow pedestrian signs leading up to it. At the smaller roads this usually works okay. At most of the larger road there are lights and while I don't love stopping in the middle of running hard, I always stop at the lights and wait until there is either zero cars in sight or the light turns to walk for me. The problem is the larger road without lights. Today I ran across a well marked intersection where the cars on one side of the road were fully stopped, but when I was already running in the crosswalk another car zipped around the corner and nearly hit me going at least 30 miles an hour. By the time it got to me I could literally touch the car. It was the middle of the day with tons of people out on the bike path including many kids.

Solution: I was thinking of maybe running with a small deployable baton with a bright yellow or red flag on the end. Anywhere from 2-4 ft, so it would be no longer than the distance of my body if I wee to trip and fall. The purpose wouldn't be to cause damage to the cars just to force them to stop and prevent them from hitting me. I know in Oregon pedestrians have right of way and legally cars are required to stop for pedestrians standing at any crosswalk/intersection. I am just unsure if this would be legal because it could pose a risk to the driver (although it wouldn't pose them any risk if they were stopping like they are legally required to.

Any advice would be appreciated.

I was at a marathon race today and one of the participants went DOWN! Luckily a friend of mine caught him. When I walked by several minutes later I stopped to see if medical staff were already there but there weren't. I'm a third year medical student in clinical, have wilderness first responder training and have worked first aid for a handful of sporting events over the years. I am certainly no paramedic but at the time I was the only person with literally any training.

My friend told me what happened and then I started assessing the patient. I assessed his mental status, HR, RR and found some glucose to rub along his gums. He was A&Ox1, but normal vitals. There really wasn't anything we could do from there. Two race medics arrived after 5 minutes and I tried to tell them he was A&Ox1 and that we had been giving him glucose, but they immediately and started talking to the patient.

I thought okay, that's totally valid he is making sure the patient is okay.

The second medic stepped over and I tried to fill her in. I mention I was a clinical medical student so that maybe she would listen when I said the patient was A&Ox1 with a HR of 120 5 minutes ago. She just ignored me. I am totally on board with not wanting help from random people, but it felt a little weird that they didn't even want to hear anything from me. (I thought it would at least be relevant that we were giving him glucose and that he had been A&Ox1 since he collapsed (without head trauma)).

So I stepped back and went to work with some of the race coordinators to track down this man's family. We were lucky enough to get his wife on the phone. We gave her an update and then I asked a couple of general questions about past medical history. I got that he had no known medical conditions or surgeries, he had't taken any medications in the past week and that he had been downing electrolyte drinks for 24 hrs. I tried to share this with the medic who waved me off. I then later tried to share with the paramedic who was taking the patient for transport.

I tried to find a moment/pause but the two times (once to the race medic and separately to the paramedic) I tried to say anything they said hold on and then never circled back.

I've heard that ems doesn't usually like when people get involved and interrupt their flow, but I also felt like knowing what his prior state was might have been helpful? And more importantly the lack of known medical conditions, medications and known ingestion of large amounts of electrolytes seemed pretty relevant to his treatment plan.

I was thinking because he was A&Ox1 and his wife wasn't gonna get to the hospital for a minute that the only person who could give this information to the ED physician was the paramedics. Given what I learned during my ED rotation, knowing those three things would change the initial differential and could influence the work up at the hospital.

Was I wrong to try and share this information with the medics/paramedics? Is there a better way to try and share information like this with ems in the future? Did I do something that was problematic/I should avoid in the future? It just seemed like all of the medical staff was fully dismissive and incredible annoyed with me.