Rescue on Skookumchuck trail and other adventures

Before anything I have to give credit to Brad and Julie of the WEMT and WFR classes for letting me use their pictures in my blog. The makeup used is quite convincing and helps put you in the mindset of fixing injured patients. In the wilderness it is more often than not the case that leaves and dirt and in this case sticks are in the patients wounds, another factor that must be considered in treatment. 

Last Friday we had our first big wilderness test... in the pouring rain. After getting geared up with packs rain coats and rain pants I arrived on the scene of the person I had to rescue. I threw at tarp over them, gave them food and drink after completing a Rapid Trauma Assessment (RTA) to make sure their head and spine was okay I built a splint for their damaged ankle with my sleeping mat and extra clothing. It was fun, but the challenge of the rain was to not get the inside of the splint wet, and to keep the patient dry. My patient decided he wanted to be  very "irritable" and tried to give me attitude as I fixed his splint up. Another factor to make the simulation all the more realistic.
We try to have fun on the weekends in the outdoors, and as you can see we have a bunch of wilderness enthusiast characters in our class.

 Yesterday another student Harry and I went to do our clinical at Memorial Hospital. I have already completed one clinical at North Conway Ambulance. However, we did not receive any emergency calls so I just chatted with the EMTs, watched a movie, and then went to visit the fire station which is also right near the train station. We stayed at the first aid station because they were having a special "Thomas the Train" event so lots of kids were around. It was very anticlimactic, especially since I was very nervous before I went, afraid I would see a car wreak, a death, cardiac event, or some other traumatic or medical emergency.

In the hospital I watched a little four year old get staples in his head where he banged it going down a slide, a man getting interviewed for kidney problems, and a 16 year old get abrasions cleaned out after he wiped out on his bicycle. The most interesting case was one gentleman who came in with what he was afraid was a dislocated patella (knee cap). However he had a small fracture. He decided to operate. So Harry and I got changed into scrubs, put on lead covering (to protect us from the x-rays that they took throughout the surgery). We got to watch from right in the OR as they put two straight pieces of metal to hold the bits on, and a figure 8 wire in to his knee cap. It was crazy to watch someone get cut open and poked and prodded then sewn back up! We stayed an extra half hour so we could watch the full procedure. It was amazing! My interest in the medical field has grown from all that I am seeing and learning!!

This is a picture of my roommate getting her arm splinted up during a simulation.

After getting home and settling to bed at around 11:45 following my memorial hospital clinical I heard out "RESCUERS" being called down the hall way of the dorm. Bill, the teacher, was waking us all up because a girl was stuck on Skookumchuck trail with a knee injury (remind me to never mess up my knee!) Some rescuers had already arrived with a stretcher and had been working since midnight to get her down. After driving to and hiking the muddy rocky trail with headlamps we came upon the "fish cops" at 4:30 am. It took until about 6:45 to load her into the ambulance. Luckily the girl was only about 110 pounds, but it was still a challenge  to carry her. This is a picture from practice we did in class- 

We switched off having 6 people carry at a time. There were 10 people from SOLO (including myself, the only female of the group). My hands are a bit achy after gripping the liter for all that time. The trail we traversed was much rougher than the well groomed flat trail we practiced on in class. After getting home I went to 8:30 mass at beautiful "Our Lady of the Mountains" church and get home and slept until 4. 

"Its all fun and games until someone looses a pulse"

EMT camp is awesome. We had "respira-palusa" last week where half the class (20 guys and 4 ladies) was a station where they would have a dummy (adult, child or infant) and say something like "I walked out of the room for like a second and my little brother was playing with one of his toys and tried to stick it in a socket" or "This man was complaining of chest pain... I don't know him" or they would pretend they were choking and still conscious... and then passed out after a minute or so as we tried to dislodge whatever they were choking on, or we would come upon a scene where there was just someone lying there... or rolling around on the groud complaining of pain and based on the symptoms they told us were present as we felt pulses, listened to breathing, and did quick physical exams we had to figure out what was wrong and act out what our role should be.

Classes are LONG! (8-12 1-4:30 and 5:30-7) but I could not ask for a better teacher. Bill was one of the SOLO wilderness medicine schools first, and so knows how to teach (with all the voices) for hours on end. He is still and EMT in Maine and NH and has seen *well almost* every type of trauma, medical problem, or wilderness scenereo in the book.

 We also received our complete medical handbag kits. They have everything from acebandages to stethescopes and sphygmonometers. We practiced listening to eachothers lungs and taking blood pressures. I am honestly having so much fun studying my text book. While some parts can be tedious the human body is AWESOME! I love learning about the details we just passed over in highschool.

Like I said there are only three other girls beside myself, and we all range in age from seventeen to sixty something (One of the boys was actually in a Model United Nations Committee I chaird... small world). One of my room mates is from Washington DC, and the other from Florida. People have come from Kansas, South Carolina, California, France, and Iceland and other places and everyone has awesome life and travel stories. While we come from all walks of life we have fun together and get along very well. (THIS POST I WROTE EARLIER than the date that it says it was published but I didn't get a chance to publish earlier than this).