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Dr Soroosh Firoozan 2019-05-08 Person 5 5 0

Whilst walking through the main corridor of Stoke Mandeville Hospital last night (where my mother is an inpatient again), I recognised Dr Firoozan's face from one of the new posters hanging up profiling some of the hospital's staff. I felt I needed to write a review to thank him as I was not able to fully do so at the time last summer and never caught his name. Dr Firoozan was my mother's knight in shining armour when he and his team saved her life when they answered the peri-arrest call put out by the ward doctors in July 2018. My mother was an inpatient at Stoke Mandeville suffering from hyperkalemia and was receiving IV dextrose / insulin treatment to reduce her potassium levels. Unfortunately, on the evening in question, the nurse looking after my mother had failed to monitor her blood sugar levels which she ought to have done due to the administration of insulin (this matter was appropriately dealt with by a DATIX and subsequent hospital investigation). My mother suddenly started to deteriorate within a matter of minutes - sweating profusely, trouble breathing, seizures, drifting in and out of consciousness. Thankfully I was visiting my mother at the time and was able to alert the nurses, who called for the ward doctors, who then warned me that she was about to go into cardiac arrest and who in turn quickly called for the resuscitation team from ICU which was led by the marvellous Dr Firoozan. Dr Firoozan was fantastic and worked out that my mother had most probably become severely hypoglycemic from the insulin (my mother is not diabetic) and the blood glucose test showed 0.9 mmol/L. His team were busy working around her trying to stabilise her and Dr Firoozan then ordered for them to quickly administer IV dextrose which they squeezed into her. It was a traumatic thing to witness on what should have been just another quiet evening visiting my mother in hospital but Dr Firoozan was fantastic. He was so calm and reassuring and very kind to my mother once she 'came around' a few minutes later. He assured me that he and his team were only up the corridor and would come running again should there be any further problems with my mother in the night. Then off they went, as quickly as they came, with all their trolleys and equipment. I am sure Dr Firoozan has saved many hundreds of lives since then (and many thousands over his career), and it was just another bleep to respond to, but for my mother and our family he was truly a hero and we will forever be grateful to him.