Incident: Medical Assist
One just never knows what to expect when we get a call for a victim who has fallen. So, when we arrived on scene, we found a 71 year old woman lying on the floor covered in blood. Her house looked like a scene right out of a horror movie with blood trails throughout her small 2-bedroom bungalow home. Towards the rear part of the house, she had fallen and hit her head on the damn door jam. The fall, had split her forehead open almost from ear to ear. She had crawled from where she had fallen and hit her head near the kitchen, to the phone in the living room but couldn't reach it. She finally crawled over to the front door to try and open it to get help. I am not exaggerating when I tell you, there was blood everywhere.
Luckily for her, a good neighbour had been to the grocery store that afternoon and picked her up some basic essentials. It was her neighbour that found her, when she came by her house to drop off the groceries. She called 911. We took her vitals while we bandaged her up and placed her in a cervical collar and on a backboard, then sent her on her way to the hospital.
After our patient had been transported to the hospital, we stood there in the long narrow hallway and stared at each other, for just a few moments, as if we were trying to read each other's minds. Together, we started to clean up. We used towels and mopped up the floor. We went through and cleaned as much as we could, as quickly as possible. Before leaving, we took the towels that we had used, and a rug that had been soaked in blood and put them in a garbage bag, which her neighbour took home to clean.
It was about a day later that I was questioned as to why I stayed on scene so long and did not return to the station sooner. It didn't come as a big surprise, I knew that I would eventually have to justify remaining on scene as long as we did. (Aaaargh!) So, shaking my head in disbelief that I would actually be asked such a question, all I could say was that as a crew, we decided that no one should have to come home from such a traumatic event just to have to clean their house and relive it.
Really... I think that some 'high ups' have forgotten what it's like to be on scene.
Word of the day... COMPASSION: 1. A deep awareness of and sympathy for another's suffering.
2. The humane quality of understanding the suffering of others and wanting to do something about it.
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captain
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