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Rep. Martha Bagley, D-Machias, doesn’t remember the trip she took late last year on LifeFlight, the medical helicopter service, but she knows it saved her life.
Bagley had developed such a severe infection that doctors at Down East Community Hospital in Machias were unsure if she’d survive the two-hour ambulance ride to Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor. In fact, they weren’t even sure she’d survive the 20-minute helicopter ride.
She did survive and was nursed back to health during weeks in EMMC. The precious time saved by the helicopter flight makes her pause when she considers what could have happened without it.
“I probably would have never made it,” Bagley said.
Bagley says she is the only state legislator to have taken a ride on LifeFlight, but she wasn’t alone in recognizing it for its work in a joint House-Senate resolution passed in late May.
“It’s just a tremendous service that’s just doing so much for so many,” she said.
The resolution was sponsored by Rep. Joseph Perry, D-Bangor, after a request from EMMC’s lobbyist in Augusta. Perry said after more than two years in service the LifeFlight helicopters, based at EMMC and Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston, deserve note.
“I think it’s been a proven success,” Perry said. “Many lives have been saved by having it available.”
Perry said the expense of medical helicopters – nationally an individual flight averages $5,000 to $6,000 – is outweighed by the quick help it provides to people in need in Maine’s difficult to reach locations. The helicopter cruises at 160 miles per hour.
There is no shortage of stories about LifeFlight’s lifesaving work.
Last month LifeFlight was dispatched to the Androscoggin River in Oxford to rescue two kayakers. One was stranded on an island and the other clung to a branch as cold water rushed by for nearly three hours. Rescuers and LifeFlight personnel ultimately whisked the two to Central Maine Medical Center.
Also last month LifeFlight carried Barbara Fowler, 71, of Hartland on the relatively short hop from Sebasticook Valley Hospital to EMMC because of severe complications from a bleeding ulcer.
“The doctor really didn’t think she could make it that far [by ambulance],” said her son the Rev. Robert Fowler. “She was bleeding out faster than they could put [blood] in.”
Maine has two of New England’s seven hospital helicopters. LifeFlight, a joint operation between EMMC and CMMC, began operating in September 1998. Since then the two helicopters, located in Bangor and Lewiston, have made more than 890 flights.
There were 372 flights last fiscal year, of which 174 were from Bangor. Flights for the first three-quarters of this fiscal year are already ahead of last year’s totals, said Thomas Judge, LifeFlight’s executive director.
He expects the two helicopters will total about 800 flights a year soon, he said. The growing use is because doctors have become more familiar and comfortable with the service, Judge said.
Initially, trauma patients accounted for as much as 80 percent of all flights. Now that more nontrauma patients, who need emergency surgery or catheterization are more frequently transported by air, trauma patients are down to 60 percent of all flights.
How many lives have actually been saved?
Judge said that LifeFlight tabulates the types of medical interventions performed along with travel times and other variables in figuring how many people are, what he terms, “unexpected survivors,” or survive because of the helicopter intervention. Administrators estimate that three of every four patients transported are alive today because of the service.
But, he adds, there are probably an additional 30 patients whose quick transportation to Boston allowed arms and fingers to be reattached. These people resumed normal lives, Judge said.
When a request comes to Bangor for a flight, there is a quick decision on whether it meets criteria. Then, members of the flight team spring into action.
Specially trained “resource nurses” are taken from their regular duties and asked to scramble to the helipad atop the outpatient surgery building.
Relevant blood supplies are readied, and the helicopter is airborne in an average of 11 minutes. Except in cases where time isn’t as crucial, the goal is to be airborne in less than 12 minutes, Judge said.
Each of the two helicopters has four full-time pilots who serve shifts to keep the machines available 24 hours a day. In cold weather, they also place heaters in the helicopters to keep them warm, and ready for immediate flight.
Despite the lives LifeFlight crews save, they don’t do any of the rescues where a winch is needed to pull a person to safety. For that, LifeFlight works closely with the National Guard. One call does it all, Judge said. The two work together by radio readily.
In one instance last year, a patient, who’d already been receiving care from LifeFlight personnel, was winched out of a quarry by a National Guard helicopter.
Rep. Perry has nothing but praise for LifeFlight’s role in helping rural Mainers get to the hospital.
“People can be a long way from the hospital [in Maine],” he said.
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