Friday, January 7, 2011

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.

2 comments:

  1. We were once at that house everyone has where the family is a major pain in the ass, harassing neighbors, suing the police etc, anyway they were all grossly overweight, oldest son sitting up on couch having chest pains and my Capt catches sight of him reaching into the crevice of the couch and palming off a small revolver to his brother...

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