There are a few things patients riding in an ambulance on the way to an emergency room should not have to worry about. What's wrong with me? What just happened? Am I going to die? Those are all valid thoughts worthy of consideration (assuming you are conscious) as you stare at the ceiling of the ambulance en route to the hospital.
Here's what your anxiety should not have to cover: Does the driver know how to get to the hospital? If not, is there a map somewhere inside the ambulance that the driver could use? If not, is there a dispatcher the driver could call for some directions?
On Oct. 7, during the warmest Chicago Marathon in the race's 30-year history, all those hypothetical questions became tragic reality.
Chad Schieber, a 35-year-old police officer from Michigan, collapsed while on the 26.2-mile course and later died.
Initially, it was thought that high humidity and temperatures in the upper 80s were the main cause of Schieber's death, but an autopsy blamed a heart condition called mitral valve prolapse. Experts have since said the condition rarely is life threatening.
While Schieber's death should by no means be overlooked or trivialized, one of the more alarming aspects of this story is that the ambulance taking him to the hospital had no idea where it was going.
When Schieber collapsed on the course he was about six blocks from the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Center. Six blocks. That's it.
Chicago fire department spokesman Larry Langford told reporters the ambulance crew radioed Chicago dispatchers that Schieber was in full cardiac arrest and that they planned to take him to the UIC Medical Center. And then the ambulance took off.
In the wrong direction.
After driving a few blocks, the ambulance, which was from the suburb of Niles, flagged down a city ambulance and asked for directions. It then proceeded to drive past the hospital because it could not find the emergency room entrance.
Eventually, it delivered Schieber to the West Side Veterans Administration Hospital a few blocks away.
In addition to not knowing where it was going, the ambulance crew also did not have maps of the marathon road closures. When the crew radioed dispatchers for directions, it got no response.
Now, Schieber's family gets to live with the "what ifs" that accompany a botched emergency service mission. What if the ambulance had driven straight to the hospital? Would that have allowed emergency room doctors enough time to save him?
What if a map had been available to the ambulance driver? How much time would that have saved?
"What ifs" typically are torture on the human psyche, but to the Schieber family's credit, they are handling this news with an unbelievable amount of perspective.
"We want to see what happens," Krystn Madrine, Schieber's sister-in-law, told the Associated Press. "We hope that something good will come of Chicago's discovering that they did not do a very good job."
That day was a nightmare in so many different ways for the race's organizers. They had to call off the race after three and a half hours due to the extreme heat. By then, they had run out of water to give race participants and hundreds of runners were taken to area hospitals for treatment.
Weather conditions certainly caused an unforeseen mess that day, but that is no excuse for the irresponsibility that kept Schieber from receiving his best shot at survival.
How on earth could an emergency service crew and its dispatchers be so inept, so unprepared?
That's yet another question one should not have to ponder while fighting to stay alive in the back of a stray ambulance.