You know the drill.  The pager goes off, probably at 4am or so, you swear aloud, climb out of your warm bed and throw on your clothes.  If you’re smart, you’ve left clean scrubs out so you don’t have to find anything else to wear.  On your way out, you trip over the dog, who’s thinking “awesome, it’s time to go out and smell stuff!!”, and maybe, just maybe, you have time to grab a coffee (and I have one word for you…Keurig).

You get into your cold car, turn on the defrost, and hope the windshield washer fluid doesn’t make the icing worse (another tip…Deicer in a can…don’t know who invented it, but they should be up for a Nobel prize).  Now, on the road…is there rain?  Snow?  Ice?  Been there, my friend, and it sucks.  Royally.  But you have someplace to be…and a limited amount of time to get there.

Welcome to the world of D2B.  Door-to-balloon time to you and me.  So how much time do you have to get to the lab?  30 minutes?  Average.  Do you live close or far?  I happen to live 10 minutes from my lab, a fact that pisses off my coworkers to no end.  But, hey…they chose to live 28 and a half minutes away.  Sucks to be them!

You get to the hospital, set up your table, call the ER, and run.  If you’re lucky, you don’t have the cardiologist breathing down your neck.  Either way, you know what you have to do.  And you do it. 

Door-to-balloon is about more than just meeting a 90 minute goal.  We all know that.  The goal is a good thing.  But it isn’t the only thing.  “Time is muscle”…and time can make the difference between life and death.