Everybody Needs a Hand From Time to Time

I struggled with myself wondering whether telling this next story would be appropriate. I finally decided to share this particular adventure because I would like you to know how taxing some of the situations can be for your volunteer or paid emergency personnel and how they have developed a way of coping.  They use humor that may make them appear less sensitive than they truly are. I have responded to a number of calls that left me physically drained for days; saddened me for months and even some events that changed my life forever. After responding to a particularly gruesome tragedy, you have to be able to step back into your real life and function in your own family even though you may still feel only half normal. I can remember many times when my own children, having fallen down and skinned up a knee badly while playing outside, would come running into the house bawling. If I had just returned from a gory accident where someone had almost lost a leg, where it had been barely held on by some loose skin, it could be hard for me to relate to why my offspring was making such a big fuss over their little "boo-boo." For me to be able to cope after seeing some of the tragic things I have seen in my life, I have had to become emotionally toughened...

It was over a hundred degrees that summer afternoon when the call came in to assist a man and wife who had been traveling back home after a pleasant day visiting the Redwoods. The return road trip was quite curvy and the lady was feeling car-sick. With her eyes closed, she rested her head on her arm leaning out the open window of the passenger's seat to let some cooler air blow across her sweating brow. What caused the husband to careen off the highway, I will never know. But the front fender of the passenger side clipped a massive Douglas fir tree and the car's momentum carried it, scraping hard, along side the car. With her head resting slightly outside the car window, the tree struck her head and bounced it back into the vehicle.

When we arrived on scene, it was a complete chaotic mess. Passing motorists had parked sideways in the road all over the place. First, we had to close the highway so our rescuers and good Samaritans wouldn’t get run over by some gawking "lookie-loo’s" speeding by on the blind corner. Whenever we are extricating a patient from a vehicle, we always wear all our heavy turn-out gear for protection from sharp metal fragments and on this summer day the temperature made that gear almost intolerable. Even though the car had hit this massive tree, it still had not come to rest very far off the roadway. The tourists like to see these ancient, humongous trees up close when they are traveling, so Oregon lets them grow almost next to the side of the road in this section of our highway.

Even with all the surrounding confusion and noise along the busy highway, we could clearly hear the lady screaming in unimaginable pain. I rushed down the slight embankment into loose gravel in the roadside ditch to get to her. I could see that her arm had been smashed completely off just above the elbow where the car had struck the tree and skidded against it before coming to a jarring stop. She was bleeding profusely which I attempted to stem by applying a field dressing. I was not able to make her listen to me, “Hold Still!” “Hold Still!” because she was too panicked by her situation and a serious head injury. My comrades kept passing me huge wads of absorbent bandages as I tried to pack her horrific wound and stop the arterial bleeding. Holding the top of her upper arm firmly with one hand I tried to hold the dressing on her torn stump with my other hand, but she was actually picking my 200 pounds off the ground with the strength her panic and adrenaline had given her.

My boys were working hard to cut her out of the car with the Jaws of Life while I continued trying to stem the flow of her life’s blood. Carefully, methodically, they finally got her freed and she was packaged up for the ambulance, fighting us the whole time. I have never seen (before or since) such a small lady throw so many burly firemen around, but she was ultimately secured and loaded into the waiting ambulance. There is a Cardinal EMT Rule not many people know about that simply states… If you have a patient, he or she leaves the scene with all of his/her respective pieces and parts. So in this case, the relevant question was where was the arm?

The ambulance needed to rush her to the hospital, but it waited while we began looking around frantically for the missing appendage. I was too physically and emotionally exhausted from wrestling with the woman to look for it. I stubbled back onto the highway and began stripping off my sweat-soaked turnouts before I passed out from the heat. I was bent double, with my sweat dripping off my head, my hands trembling on my knees, mentally running on empty when somebody tapped me on my sweat soaked shoulder. I instinctively turned around to retrieve what I assumed would be one of our extrication tools needing to be put away. I stood up and turned around with my hands out into which an ordinary citizen tried to place the lady's amputated arm. I had been the one screaming just a few minutes before, “Find the arm, find the arm!!” I guess the man just figured that when he found the arm lying in the leaves in the ditch, I was the one who wanted it. I reflexly swore at him, “WHAT the HELL!!! Take it to the ambulance!!!!” I doubt I will ever forget the color of the finger nail polish on that “smuffy blue” amputated arm. I did learn later that the lady did survive her injuries, but her arm had been too badly damaged to be reattached. I have struggled with the memory of this call that has remained trapped in my mind for many years.

To the general public, we firefighters may sometimes seem quite callus because we tend to joke around with each other a lot. When on scene we are trained to be professional and certainly not to curse at the helping public. Back at the station though, it is quite a different story. When asked later about this crash, "Blaze, how were you able to find that lady’s arm?" I would tell them, "Well, there I was standing in the middle of the roadway when I heard something. I yelled for everyone to be quiet. With all of us listening intently we could hear a snapping sound coming from the ditch along the highway. Creeping towards the faint noise we saw, covered in leaves, the hand snapping its fingers trying to get our attention." Sounds awful? Well maybe, but by making light of the gruesome things we see, we learn to cope with gruesome reality. We make jokes to help deal with some things that are otherwise pretty difficult to talk and think about.