One experience that stood out to me in the book “Trauma Junkie, Memoirs of an Emergency Flight Nurse” would be the first flight that Janice is involved with in the beginning of the book. During this incident, the emergency flight rescue team is called to Santa Cruz for a motorcycle accident. While in the helicopter on the way there Janice is very nervous and messes up on her radio calls to back to base and freezes up a couple of times. Janice has to ask her co worker Harry for some help with the radio a couple times. When the helicopter lands, the rescue team finds a firefighter and asks him what is going on and they figure out that there have been multiple accidents very close to one another, about a mile apart from each other to be exact. …show more content…
The team gets a ride to the motorcycle accident in San Mateo from the firefighter. When they get on scene, Janice describes the victim; “This poor man wasn’t recognizable as human. His head was a jagged mass of bone and tissue; his entire face was disconnected from his skull.” The description gives a very good image of what this patient looked like and how severe his injuries were.
The victim had planted his face into the back of a parked van while he was driving about seventy miles an hour without a helmet on his motorcycle. Janice was instructed to takeover bagging the patient from a firefighter who was already there. Bagging the patient was nearly impossible because of the severity of his injuries; every time Janice went to give him a breath, blood squirted out and covered her goggles, making it difficult for her to see what she was doing. A couple minutes later, Harry tried to intubate the patient but could not see anything he was doing due to massive amounts of blood, so Janice began to bag the patient again as Harry went and asked someone driving a pickup truck to give them a ride back to the helicopter, the driver, although startled from the accident hesitantly agreed to give them a ride back. While driving back after passing the county line into Santa Cruz, Harry asked the driver to pull over and he made an incision in the patient's neck, and put a trach tube in to ventilate the …show more content…
patient. “We’re not authorized to do that in San Mateo, but we can in Santa Cruz.” Harry explained to Janice. When the crew got back to the helicopter, they took off and got the patient into the trauma center in less than ten minutes. It does not explain what happened to the patient as a result. Janice states; “I was just glad it was over.” The first medical intervention that the flight squad performed would be when Janice was bagging the patient as soon as they arrived on scene.
A second would be making sure to keep the patient still and not move his neck or head to be sure if he did have any injuries to his spine, they would not increase the injuries. Another medical intervention would be when Harry tried intibating the patient on scene even though it was unsuccessful. Another intervention that occurred during this incident was, Harry making the incision in the patient's neck while driving back to the helicopter, allowing him to put in a tracheal tube and give the patient the first good ventilations sense the accident occurred, which could have been the difference between the patient living or dying. Lastly, the flight squad did everything they could very quickly so they could get the patient back to the helicopter and to the trauma center as soon as
possible. The first interaction between the flight team would be when Harry had to help Janice on the helicopter with all the radio issues that occurred. Secondly, when the squad arrived on scene and Harry told Janice what she should be doing, and when Harry tried to intubate the patient, he told Janice what she should be doing and how he could help him do it. Lastly, when the team is driving back to the helicopter, Harry tried to lighten the mood after he makes the incision by saying; “Neat trick, eh?” Janice was affected by feeling squeamish when she first started bagging the patient, she felt sorry for the patient, and she was also very relieved when it was over. The incident did not seem to bother Harry very much, he was all business and knew exactly what to do. My reaction to the incident; I think I feel like Janice did, the description of the patient made me feel a little squeamish as well. I could never imagine having to bag a patient when their face is all torn apart and their head being messed up. I felt bad for Janice when she messed up on the radio and had to ask for help but I know if I was doing it myself, I would have done the same thing, maybe even worse. How she described the scene by how busy it was, it seemed very intimidating, and like there would be lots of noise and commotion, I would feel really under pressure and like I was doing everything wrong. I wish they had said what happened to the patient though. With the severity of his injuries I think he didn’t survive, he could have though, it just didn’t seem very likely.
Since he had so much downtime he had added his name to a volunteer list of emergency ambulance calls. Gary and his wife had lived in very small prairie town in the middle of of a farm country. With one hamy-down ambulance that the city had given them since they had bought new ones. They had answered calls to car accidents ,farming accidents,gun accidents,poisonings,and a very good amount of heart attacks. He would usually go alone or sometimes with another man who had also volunteered to answer emergency ambulance calls. He recalls that he has seen at least a dozen heart attack victims in the last year. Sometimes the distance were so long that he could not make it. If he did they had to wait at most an hour or maybe longer for the flight for life helicopter. One day he can remember was one day a woman called and said” quick it's my Harvey he is having chest pains again”. He got in the car should of got there in twenty minutes but he got there fourteen by driving like a crazy person. Then saw the man with a weird smile as if trying to say sorry for the difficulty. The wife had also gave him a look like thank god you're here save him please the gray look on him was bad. When he tried to put him on his back he jolted for some reason as if he was getting hit by electricity became stiff and fell on the ground. He told the wife to call for the chopper. Then bent
"So she went to sleep. I didn't know about plastic bags. I wish I had. Because...It seemed to be back firing. And I was fortunate enough at the very last to be able to hit a vein right.... [B]efore I could do that, the one son came into the room.... took his hands and held her veins for me.... I said, 'Oh God, she's startin' to breathe again.' And [the other son] said, 'I'll take a pillow.
An example of one nursing officer’s experience under fire is from Sister Kelly’s diary from the Casualty Clearing Station at the Western Front....
That night, many witnesses reported having seen a man changing the tire of his van and waving any possible help away angrily while others reported seeing a woman wandering around the side of the dangerous highway. More witnesses reported that Kenneth and his wife were having many violent disputes at their home that usually resulted in Kenneth pursuing an angry Yvonne around the block. The most compelling evidence against Mathison, however, is purely scientific. Detective Paul Ferreira first noticed that the extensive blood stains inside the Mathison van. After hearing Mathison’s original account, he summoned the assistance of famed forensic expert Dr. Henry Lee to analyze what he thought was inconsistent evidence. Blood stains on the paneling and the spare tire in the cargo area reveal low-velocity blood stains meaning that the blood probably dripped from Yvonne’s head onto the floor. The stains found on the roof and steering wheel were contact transfer patterns probably caused by Mathison’s bloody hands. Blood stains on the driver’s side of the van were contact-dripping patterns which indicate that Mathison touched the inside of the van multiple times before and after moving his wife’s body. The final groups of blood stains on the instrument panel of the van were medium-velocity stains which show investigators that Mathison probably struck his wife at least once in the front seat causing the blood to fly from her open head wound. The enormous amounts of blood inside the van lead prosecutor Kurt Spohn to investigate the Mathison case as a murder instead of a misdemeanor traffic violation.
To begin, throughout slavery slaves were forced to endure tremendous amounts of psychological/emotional trauma. Psychological/emotional trauma can be defined as the heavy amounts of stress that the slaves were forced to experience due to the harsh reality of the slave lifestyle. The psychological/emotional trauma caused slaves to negatively change their perspective on life and their overall way of thinking. This is illustrated in the film Sankofa, when the film excellently portrays the differences between the two save classes: field slaves and house slaves. In the movie Sankofa the field slaves have a strong dislike for the house slaves, because the house slaves received many luxuries that the field slaves didn’t. These luxuries included having
Trauma can be defined as something that repeats itself. In The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, trauma recurs in soldiers for different reasons. However, although their reasons for trauma are different, the things they carried can symbolize all the emotions and pasts of these soldiers. One man may suffer trauma from looking through letters and photographs of an old lover, while another man could feel trauma just from memories of the past. The word “carried” is used repeatedly throughout The Things They Carried. Derived from the Latin word “quadrare,” meaning “suitable,” O’Brien uses the word “carried” not to simply state what the men were carrying, but to give us insight into each soldiers’ emotions and character, his past, and his present.
The current patient may be experiencing a range of traumatic injuries after his accident, the injuries that the paramedic will focus on are those that are most life threatening. These injuries include: a possible tension pneumothroax or a haemothorax, hypovolemic shock, a mild or stable pelvic fracture and tibia fibula fracture.
With patient safety always being the number one priority FTR is the worst case scenario for the hospitalized patient. In an article titled “Failure to Rescue: The Nurse’s Impact” from the Medsurg Nursing Journal author Garvey explains ways FTR can occur “including organizational failure, provider lack of knowledge and failure to realize clinical injury, lack of supervision, and failure to get advice.” Nurses are problem solvers by nature, they heal the sick and help save lives. FTR is a tragic experience for everyone involved. The recent surge in this happening across the country has given FTR cases widespread media coverage. Hospitals are trying to figure out what the root cause is and how they can be prevented. Fortunately, with the advancement of technology and extensive research many hospitals have developed action plans and procedures to help prevent the early warning signs from being
The treatment priorities of the registered nurse upon admission to the emergency department are as follows; within the first 10 minutes of Mr. Bronson’s arrival to the emergency department begin a 12 lead ECG. Assess Mr. Bronson’s vitals heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, and administer oxygen 2-4 liters via nasal cannula (Sen, B., McNab, A., & Burdess, C., 2009, p. 19). Assess any pre hospital medications, and if he has done cocaine in the last 24 hours. At this time, the nurse should assess Mr. Bronson’s pain quality, location, duration, radiation, and intensity. Timing of onset of current episode that brought him to the emergency room, any precipitating factors, and what relieves his chest pain.
One of these stories told was Miss Esmee Sartorius’, a nurse for the British Red Cross during the First World War. She wrote her memoir about her time from August to approximately October 1914 in order to tell her personal description about how emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and physically challenging it was to be a nurse amidst the danger of enemy lines. Her story was first published in 1930 in Everyman at War, a compilation of personal narratives of World War I. Throughout her time as a nurse, Esmee traveled to several different countries, taking care of injured soldiers and writing her experiences. Her story began in Brussels, Belgium, along with 39 other nurses who we...
Maus by Art Spiegelman is a comic book about his journey to uncover his father’s past while struggling to mend their unsteady relationship. While interviewing his father, Artie realizes just how much trauma his father had endured in the Holocaust. Through gathering information from his father Artie realizes that he had accumulated some of the same paranoia from his parents. The second generations of Jewish people specifically the descendants of Holocaust survivor’s acquire a large amount of grief, depression, and anxiety from their parents through various ways. In Artie’s case he was inflicted with the grief of not having endured the Holocaust like the rest of his family, whereas
An elderly woman came in on her scooter and said she needed help while she was losing consciousness. We had to take her to one of our room immediately and the second she was put in the room she was asked a bunch of questions she couldn’t answer at the time. As I nervously watched another emergency happened down the hall and my mentor had to run to that, emergency, she turned to me and said “You can handle this right? You went through all the training so you should be good!” before I could say anything she closed the door behind her. It was that moment I realized I wasn’t trained on what to do in emergencies.
Kelley and her mother were in a car crash. Kelley wakes up in the burn ward at the hospital. She is told she has second and third degree burns on her right side. The burns were on her right hands, her leg, and her face. She has to spend eight weeks in the hospital. Kelley has to have pins drilled in her burnt and broken leg. The nurses then pluck all the dead skin from her body with tweezers. The doctors have to take skin from other parts of her body to graft onto the burnt parts of her body. Kelley was told she had to wear a special mask on her face so when the skin grew back it wouldn’t be puffy and lumpy. When the swelling on her face went down and when there wasn’t so much lubricant in her eyes smearing her vision, she could see all the way down the Patapsco River to the Francis Scott Key
Discussion Because the early recognition of potentially life-threatening conditions is critical to providing appropriate care to the traumatically injured patient this study provides solid statistical data that flight crews can adequately perform and interpret POCUS results as well as out trauma team colleagues. This study could lead to a reduction of iatrogenic injuries from unnecessary invasive prehospital procedures, allow for early initiation of Massive Transfusion Protocols (MTP) prior to the patient's arrival at the Trauma Center, and potentially develop a change in trauma systems notification and transportation directly to the operating room. Conclusion Despite this study developing a very positive outlook on performing aeromedical POCUS for the evaluation and care of trauma patients additional
The novel The Sun Also Rises (1954) by Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) is told from the perspective of Jake Barnes, the protagonist, who suffered an impactful penile injury from World War I. While in the hospital, a lovely young woman, Brett, tended to him as her patient. However, over the years, they developed confusing romantic feelings for each other. Although Brett later moved on from man to man after several failed marriages, Jake continued to have a deep romantic interest in her. Correspondingly, Jake suffers what is initially physical trauma which then develops into psychological trauma.