I tell the real estate agent that if they had called me earlier, I could meet their deadline..... 🙂
Like Nate, I explain that their emergency isn't my emergency unless I see a lot of extra dollars............................................NOW
Sorry bout the hijack. I just read the link....:(
I had a young man on my crew clearing line and sunk the machete square across the back of his other hand. He had apparently been trying to hold a limb back and the blade got deflected mid-flight. He bled like a stuck pig. My t-shirt made a good wrap but the wound required pressure the whole way to the ER.
BTW, stopping the bleeding was easy compared to actually catching a 19 year old running around in the woods screaming bloody murder because he thought he had cut off his hand. That was the first time I ever really considered cold-cocking someone to get them to settle down.
What is it with young gentlemen and machetes?! I showed a young man how to properly sharpen a machetes and subsequently picks them up and acts like they are swords. Not a minute later, the tip of the gentlemen's finger was gone. He controlled the bleeding himself, but it was almost cinematic how the finger sprayed blood like in cheesy horror movies (however, not nearly as much blood).
Bradl, post: 391290, member: 2848 wrote: What is it with young gentlemen and machetes?!...
You're exactly right. Teaching my two sons to handle firearms in their pre-teen years was a lot easier than getting boneheads on a crew to play safe.
I had just unboxed a brand spanking new Lufkin HiWay chain and unrolled it on the ground. While I was tying the leather thongs in the eyelets one of my crew had chopped it clean in two with a newly sharpened machete. That was 40 years ago and it still pisses me off.
FL/GA PLS., post: 391267, member: 379 wrote: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3792416/What-bleeding-emergency-Experts-reveal-step-step-guide-save-dying-minutes.html
I always carry blood clotting supplies in the vehicle/backpack/range kit. See: http://www.quikclot.com/Products
Nothing comical about being faced with a severe bleeding event and no help available in a timely fashion.
The product linked works. It hurts when applied but could be life saving.
i happen to know a fella that no longer possesses two full thumbs. you can prolly guess why.
guy i have working for me as a survey tech was his i-man that day- got to drive him (and the save and except portion) to the hospital. sadly, the doctors were powerless to reassemble the tracts.
GeeOddMike, post: 391299, member: 677 wrote: The product linked works. It hurts when applied but could be life saving
I know I could stand a hurting during application rather than face the alternative!
Thanks for the link and have a great weekend.
"What do you do in a bleeding emergency?" I Bloody well stop the bleeding!!, Then I ring 999 for emergency services and have a spot of tea while I wait! Sorry, couldn't help it. I volunteered on the county ambulance for almost 20 years, so stopping bleeding I can do, but not with a standard OSHA first aid kit. I find those things are almost worthless in a real emergency.
I have been a paramedic for the past 8 years, and I am happy to give some input. The most important thing you can do is stay calm and stop the bleeding. Take control of the situation, and use whatever you can to stop or at the very least slow the blood loss. Most industrial first aid kits are surprisingly unequipped for major bleeding. Use a shirt, and apply pressure immediately over the wound. If the appendage is severed make a tourniquet above the next nearest joint, and do your best to locate and preserve the now detached appendage.
Megalodon, post: 391335, member: 12028 wrote: I have been a paramedic for the past 8 years, and I am happy to give some input. The most important thing you can do is stay calm and stop the bleeding. Take control of the situation, and use whatever you can to stop or at the very least slow the blood loss. Most industrial first aid kits are surprisingly unequipped for major bleeding. Use a shirt, and apply pressure immediately over the wound. If the appendage is severed make a tourniquet above the next nearest joint, and do your best to locate and preserve the now detached appendage.
I will give a second to that. My left index finger was severed during an argument. It looks a little funny but it works.
The Army made us carry compression bandages everywhere. I still have one on me in field..
We carry quick clot also. Considering we always have at least one saw running.
This reminds me, I have asked for a med bag, need to bug mgmt about it again. The warehouse has them in stock.
flyin solo, post: 391307, member: 8089 wrote: got to drive him (and the save and except portion) to the hospital. sadly, the doctors were powerless to reassemble the tracts.
This thread has some good advice. Despite the serious nature of the topic, I had to laugh at your choice of wording.
I carry a basic supply of first aid items.
For the major needs "survey flagging" works very well to apply pressure to wounds on limbs that can be wrapped.
Wounds to the body may need packing and direct pressure applied by the wounded or someone else.
When much blood appears do not hesitate and leave others behind if they are lagging because major wounds need medical attention a.s.a.p.
great topic shared it with all of my staff, good reminder to all to be careful out there
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/the-french-chef/n8667
Don't watch if you are squeamish. :smarty:
Back in 1987, I was acting as party chief on a BLM crew in AK along the Alaska Railroad. We were setting monuments that day, so were close to the tracks. I was running instrument and my #2, I'll call him Bart Shoppes for purposes of this story, was cutting through a stand of diamond willow with the chainsaw. We had safety gear issued, but the chaps were useless pieces of garbage unless you were under 5' tall. For normal sized adults, if you wore the belt loose and stood straight up, the bottom of the chaps would reach down to about the top of the kneecap. If your leg was bent, like the higher leg when standing on a steep slope, the bottom of the chaps slid up to mid-thigh. I suppose they may have been of some limited use in case of an accidental self administered vasectomy. Otherwise, all they did was get the front of your pants soaked with sweat. Having some experience with them, Bart left the chaps on the ballast next to the tracks.
If you're not familiar with diamond willow, it typically grows near water or damp soils and grows in thick clumps with dozens of trunks up to, usually about 3" or 4" diameter. In various locations in the lower 48, it would be like the alders or smaller willows that grow near streams, lakes and swamps, except the wood is denser.
There was a short but steep slope where the terrain dropped into a slightly swampy area and the slope was thick with willow clumps. Bart was on the far side, cutting back toward the gun and making pretty darn good progress. That is until I heard a distinct catch in the drone of the saw followed quickly by a loud exclamation beginning with an "s".
All summer, we've had cutting tool safety drilled into us, including the absolute requirement to always wear gloves, eye protection, ear protection, and the useless chaps when working with or near the saw. When the saw didn't start up again after a few seconds, I radioed over, and learning that Bart had cut himself, pulled the gun off the tracks and hightailed it over to his location.
Bart was standing there, bent over and holding his knee, but hadn't yet inspected the damage. There was a pretty clean tear/cut in his jeans, just below the knee. At least he had just sharpened the saw that morning. And, since he was standing, we remained optimistic. With my knife, I completed the cut in his jeans around his leg so we could get to the cut without him having to drop his drawers.
There was a very clean, almost perfectly horizontal notch, the width of the chain, 2" or 3" long, and 1/4" deep an inch or so below his kneecap and surprisingly little blood. An 1/8" deeper and he probably would have been into tendons, but he lucked out getting almost all skin, some fat, and just a little bit of meat.
You would think that he would express great relief at finding a superficial cut when he came so close to getting an early end to his field season and a permanent limp as a souvenir of his time in AK, but no. Upon seeing that he was OK, the next words out of his mouth were "Rick (Moosely, the camp chief - again, name changed to protect the guilty) is going to be pissed!" Bart was referring to the chaps lying next to the tracks rather than strapped to his thighs. (Note that although we never used the chaps when we ended up with the short ones, we always carried them with us so that we could say we had them and could start using them just in case Rick or some other camp safety Nazi happened to show up).
With this revelation, we started thinking (perhaps for the first time that morning). How are we going to report the injury without getting fired, or at least written up? Although Bart's wound was superficial, it would still require several stitches. I don't know how good this plan really was, but it worked... We unfolded the chaps onto a log, fired up the saw and hit the bottom of the leg a few times, after double and triple checking that we had the correct leg in our adrenaline amped state, to 1) manufacture, uh, I mean provide evidence that Bart was wearing the proper safety gear at the time of his injury, and 2) claim, uh, I mean demonstrate the uselessness of the little person chaps when used by a full sized man.
We were satisfied with the amount of tattering at the end of the chaps, but still didn't think it was quite convincing enough. There wasn't a lot of blood from the cut, but there was some, so Bart took the chaps and dipped the tattered threads of the shredded bottom hem into his wound. The result was most convincing, looking as if they had actually been on his leg when the accident occurred. Of course, if anyone had thought of actually reconstructing the accident, it would have become clear almost immediately that the bottom of the chaps couldn't have been any closer than 4" or 5" above where the would was if Bart was actually wearing them. No plan is perfect, but this one was good enough.
Our radios were set up with several channels that the crews could work on without interfering with each others' comms, and one channel on a repeater so that the crews could contact more distant crews, the railroad personnel that served as our work taxi drivers and RR safety officers (one of these guys is still with the ARR and can be seen on several episodes of a cable TV show about the ARR. He's the cranky older maintenance guy missing parts of two fingers). Our RR taxi for the day was Timmy Hindberg (again, not his real name), who also was a certified EMT and usually carried an emergency med kit.
After securing the evidence for our cover story, we attempted to call Timmy to come back to our location earlier than planned. All crews, RR personnel assigned to work with us, and camp HQ monitored Channel 6 (repeater ch.), so we were trying to be very careful in wording why we needed him to show up early. That would have worked out, except that Timmy really enjoyed playing surveyor, or brush ape with a machete or sanvik when no trains were near and he could hang out with a crew for a while. He thought, probably because I worded it that way, that we wanted him to help us cut brush or dig a hole to plant a monument. He was already having fun working out his frustrations on the brush where he was at, so said he would be along in an hour or so.
Me: "Timmy, we really could use your help now."
TH: "All right, I'll finish this line and come on over. About 30 minutes."
We didn't have what we needed to properly clean out Bart's cut or bandage it up to completely stop the bleeding, so I had to say...
Me: "It's not your survey abilities or railroad expertise that we need right now Timmy."
TH: "Uhh, OK (the light went on), I'm on my way!"
I was really hoping that this would have been one of the rare times when no one at camp was paying attention to the radio, but Timmy's words were barely finished when Rick comes on saying...
"EP, what's going on out there? Did someone get hurt?"
The gig was up! Busted!
Once we got back to camp, we had to face the music. No way we could tell Rick that it was anything other than a saw cut. The notch was way too obvious. Rick's first question was whether Bart was wearing chaps, so Bart showed him the tattered and bloody end of the chaps and we held our breath as Rick looked them over. He seemed satisfied and we could breathe again. But I would have never predicted what happened next.
Rick said "OK guys, here's what happened: Bart, you weren't using the saw today. That cut on your knee is from a sanvik." Seeing the dumbfounded looks on our faces, he continued "If that's a chainsaw accident, then there's a lot more reporting we need to do, Anchorage will probably make us finish the season without chainsaws, Bart will get sent back home, and EP will be out of the field for the rest of the season."
"Now I'm going to walk out and come back in a few seconds and ask what happened. Let's try this again."
...
"Hey guys. You're back early. What's up?"
"It's the darndest thing Rick. Bart was hacking through some willow with one of those sanviks, slipped and cut himself."
Bart then went and got his stitches and made sure the hospital report read that it was a sanvik accident.
Timmy stayed with the ARR for several more years. Rick stayed with the BLM for a few years and then went in to the private sector in the upper Midwest. Bart is now the County Surveyor in one of the larger metropolitan areas on the west coast.