A Normal Day at the IMSS: Psychotic Outbreaks and Heart Attack Codes that Conspicuous by Their Absence
It seems that Clinic 16 of the IMSS in Torreón decided to change its usual programming of eternal waits and replace it with an episode of ‘Breaking Bad’ Mexican version. The protagonist of this undesirable spin-off: a patient with a psychotic break who, armed with a 40-centimeter knife (yes, almost half a meter of drama), decided that his medical stay needed a little more action.
The man, visibly distressed and suffering from apparently self-inflicted wounds, did not ask for more pain medication. No, his request was much more intense: begging the police officers present to shoot him. “Shoot me, don’t be afraid!” he shouted, while the medical staff probably mentally reviewed his insurance policy. The scene, captured on video and viralized online, showed absolute chaos: the patient, in a hospital gown and blood on his chest, brandishing the knife while questioning why he couldn’t see his children.
The solution came, as in the best surreal scripts, from the Fire Department. Agents specialized in negotiation? Psychiatrists? No. Pressure water jets. Because sometimes, mental problems are solved like putting out a fire: by getting everything wet until the situation subsides. After being controlled, the man, who according to reports suffers from schizophrenia, was transferred to receive specialized psychiatric treatment. Although not before starring in a second act on the roof of the hospital pharmacy, this time in Adam’s suit, because apparently the clothes got in the way of his existential monologue.
And Meanwhile, in Sinaloa: The Infarct of Outrage
But in case this hospital reality show was not enough, the IMSS of Mazatlán decided to raise the rating with an avoidable tragedy. The journalist Martín Arellano Solorio felt that his heart was saying ‘this far’ and, like any citizen of the 21st century, he documented his ordeal in real time from his X account (formerly Twitter).
Their crime: trusting that the “Infarct Code” – that protocol designed to save lives quickly – would work. His punishment: being ignored for more than five hours while his life vanished between tweets of help and labels to the authorities. “There is no @Tu_IMSS application and with a heart attack code,” he wrote in a desperate message that mixed irony with agony.
He implored for help, tagged the director of the IMSS, Zoé Robledo, and even the president Claudia Sheinbaum. The institutional response was as efficient as a cell phone without a battery: zero. In the end, Martín died after suffering two cardiac arrests, in a hospital room where the only code that seemed active was administrative silence.
The director of the hospital, Felicitas Obeso Aguirre, later appeared on video – of course, because that solves everything – to affirm that the patient “received multidisciplinary medical care.” What he did not explain is why that same multidisciplinary team could not apply a protocol that literally has the name of the emergency that was occurring.
These two incidents, although different in nature, paint a worrying portrait of a health system that appears to operate in survival mode rather than solution mode. On the one hand, psychiatric emergency is handled with hoses, and on the other, cardiac emergency is responded to with phantom tweets. The common denominator? Citizens in vulnerable situations, dealing not only with their crisis, but with institutional incompetence.
It’s the kind of news that makes you wonder if we’re really in 2025 or if we’ve regressed to a particularly dark season of Black Mirror. And the worst thing is that there is no skip ad option.
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