identify yourself
True story.
This spring the sister-in-law of a woman I work with was using a treadmill at a local gym–the gym I belong to, as it happens. She suffered a brain aneurism and literally keeled over. She didn’t die right away, as people who have this sort of injury often do. The staff at the gym called an ambulance, but no one knew who the woman was, so she had to be taken to the hospital as a "Jane Doe." (Unfortunately, she did die a few days later.)
The staff figured out who she was eventually–by having all the women using the club go to the ladies’ locker room and put a hand on the lockers they were using. The locker without a member standing in front of it belonged to the woman who’d had the aneurism. So probably 15 minutes after the woman collapsed, her identity was known–and only then could her family be contacted.
I’m telling this story because it occurred to me that if (God forbid) I keel over at the gym, I want to make it easy for people to know who I am. I don’t expect that to happen, but neither did the woman described above. And she was my age–late 40s and in good shape.
So I had a dog tag made (at gotags.com) with my name and the home, work, and cell numbers of my husband so that he could be contacted in case of emergency. The tag also indicates that I’m a Roman Catholic, and if I had any medical conditions that needed to be identified right away, I would have listed them too.
I had a tag made for my husband too.
Now when we’re at the gym, we wear our tags.
Something to think about.
August 30th, 2005 at 1:43 pm
I did the same thing. I had a tag made at the pet store and I clip it onto my tennis shoes. It’s noisy, but it identifies me.
Silly me, I realized I needed it when the victim on an episode of Law and Order was a Jane Doe because she had no ID on her when she was attacked and killed at a park. I live in Utah, so far away from New York that it seems like an imaginary place like Neverneverland, yet I have a dog tag on my shoe.