An ICU nurse who said she thought she was going to die at Travis Scott’s Astroworld festival in Houston last weekend ended up helping other victims after she was pulled to safety.
“I was about to tell my boyfriend to tell my son that I loved him, because as it went on, it got to the point where I was like, ‘I’m going to die,'” Madeline Eskins, RN, who works at HCA Houston Healthcare Kingwood, told Fox 26 Houston on Saturday. “I really, truly thought I was going to get crushed to the point where my trachea was going to get crushed. I thought I was going to die.”
At least eight people died as a result of injuries sustained at the concert, and the rapper is now facing a spate of lawsuits over the doomed festival, which attracted some 50,000 people.
Eskins, 23, didn’t return a MedPage Today request for an interview, but told Fox 26 that the crowd was aggressively pushing as Scott took the stage Friday night. Even though she had been to the Astroworld festival in 2018 and 2019, she said the surge had never been that bad before. She said she could barely turn to her boyfriend to talk to him.
Eskins ultimately fainted, and with the help of another person, her boyfriend was able to crowd surf her about 4 feet to a barricade, where a security guard pulled her to safety.
When she did come to — alone, with a bottle of water in what she said she thought was a VIP area — she quickly realized that something was wrong.
“People were being carried back and forth,” she said. “They’re carrying this one guy out, and he looked really bad. His eyes were rolled in the back of his head. I asked the security guard if he’d checked his pulse, and he hadn’t. I checked, I didn’t feel a pulse. … His pupils weren’t reacting when I shined my flashlight in there. I said you need to take him to a medical tent.”
Another security guard who had overheard Eskins say that she was an ICU nurse asked her for help and brought her to another area with more victims.
Even though Eskins said she’s used to “seeing people die every week” working in an ICU, she said nothing could have prepared her for what she saw next.
She told Fox 26 that she saw three people laid out on the ground getting CPR from a mix of medics and civilians. She asked whether there were any supplies such as an automated external defibrillator (AED), Ambu bag, or epinephrine.
She was told there was one AED, and it was in use on another victim.
While she was doing compressions on a victim, someone brought over an Ambu bag so another responder could give the victim breaths, Eskins told the news station. Meanwhile, security brought more bodies over, she said.
Eskins noted in an Instagram post that while the “medics are not to blame … a few of them did not have experience in situations with people losing pulses.”
“Compressions were being done without a pulse check so [people] who had a pulse were getting CPR, but meanwhile there was not enough people to rotate out doing compressions on individuals that were actually pulseless,” she wrote. “The medical staff didn’t have the tools to do their jobs.”
In a subsequent Instagram post, Eskins wrote that she will “keep speaking out because I simply will not accept the crap people are spreading” — such as blaming all of the deaths on drugs.
“I’m upset that people are saying that this was all drug-related,” she told Fox 26. “There are rumors that someone was running around with a needle injecting people with drugs. I never saw that. … I will say that as someone who did not do any type of drugs, does not do any type of drugs, that I could have very easily been one of those people because I was getting suffocated.”
Eskins estimated that she was working on the victims for about 45 minutes until they were all transported into ambulances, and that she wasn’t sure if any of them would survive.
“I really hope that at least one person I was helping made it, just at least one,” she told Fox 26 on Saturday. “The one gentlemen who was blue, he was pulseless at least 15 minutes.”
Just a few days later, she learned that one of the people she’d been helping, Jacob Jurinek, age 20, had died from his injuries.
“I’m so sorry we couldn’t save you,” she wrote on Instagram. “Im so sorry you went to a concert to have fun and this is what happened to you.”
Source: MedicalNewsToday.com
