Man Down

We had so many calls that night that I can't remember if this was the third or fourth call after midnight. And it was only 0200. We were being toned out for a man down out on the street.

As we approached the scene we saw a man waiving frantically pointing to a dark parking lot behind. As I jumped off the rig I wasn't able to tell exactly where or who my patient was. I grabbed my drug box and heart monitor and headed toward the back of the lot. There, leaning on the trunk of the last car, was my patient. As I pointed the beam of my flashlight toward him I noticed blood dripping down over the bumper and onto the asphalt.

I immediately checked my surroundings to double check my own safety. I then called back for my engineer to grab the trauma bag.

It looked like the victim was bleeding from his right arm. He found a 20 foot length of thick wire and had wrapped around his upper arm several times in an attempt to to fashion a tourniquet. Unfortunately is was on too loosely to be of any help. My patients right wrist had been slashed from just below the base of his thumb to a point almost a third of the way to his elbow on the pinky side.

My engineer grabbed a trauma dressing and handed it to me. I applied some direct pressure and the wrapped the bandage with kerlix. I then disentangled the man from his make shift attempt at bleeding control. Once that was done we did a quick strip and flip to see if he had any other injuries.

Once the patient had been strapped to the backboard and loaded up I was able to talk to PD a little about what they found. They said that they had conflicting stories as to weather or not the injury was self inflicted. They also hadn't found the knife. As I was collecting my things from the scene I found the knife sitting under the spoiler of the car where I found my patient.

I'm glad he wasn't aggressive.