HOUSTON – On May 18, KPRC 2 is celebrating medical heroes throughout Texas Medical Center.
One critical program in the great Houston area is Memorial Hermann Life Flight. The men and women who work Life Flight never stop. It runs 24/7, 365 days a year. Crews perform about 3,500 missions each year.
This program serves patients from within a 150-mile radius around TMC. This life flight was the first Texas air medical ambulance to land at Super Dome following Hurricane Katrina to evacuate patients.
One patient (not from Katrina) has been waiting to thank the men and women of the program for more than five years, for saving his life.
Marion Darneille, standing next to his wife Kimberly, said, “Marion’s survival is an absolute miracle and part of that is life flight.”
Marion said he only remembers a little bit of his medical emergency.
“I was getting ready to go to bed, lay down, complaining about my tablet not charging and then I woke up here,” Marion said.
His wife Kimberly filled in the blanks, saying, “When he fell out of the bed, I thought he might have knocked himself out. I didn’t have a thought what it could be, I just knew he needed advanced care that I couldn’t give him, so luckily, I had the brainpower to call 911, and open the door and then they ordered me to begin CPR and that’s what I did. Marion had a massive heart attack.”
The helipad at Memorial Hermann is the busiest trauma helipad in the nation, according to Memorial Hermann.
Adam Owens is a Memorial Hermann Life Flight pilot.
“We implanted a process here, that allows this aircraft and me to fly in under adverse weather conditions. Another unique capability combined with that is scene to OR process. By the time, I have seen it, by the time we have landed here, skids down, about one to two minutes off the aircraft and about two to three minutes they are actually inside the operating room which is very unique thing here to Memorial Hermann Life Flight,” Owens said.
Every second counts, especially for registered nurse and paramedic Jon Ngo.
“You can’t imagine, how I feel when we see a patient come back from death, not near death; but death multiple times, to come back and talk, converse with us, and laugh, that’s amazing,” Ngo said.
“I don’t have words to say thank you, for what this means to us,” said Marion.