pg-13

WARNING: This post is rated PG-13,
if you don't like blood DO NOT SCROLL DOWN.

Maybe they were tired of being trapped inside after the week of blizzard. Maybe they were just stupid. Well there's no maybe about it - drinking and driving is always ALWAYS stupid. So this car was going down a snowy/icy residential (25 mph) road in the middle of the night. Officers on scene estimated that the car was going about 60 mph. It blew through a stop sign and lost control, sideswiped a van taking out its door, smashed into a truck and pushed it 20+ feet.

I was on the Quint. The Medic crew got there first and dedicated themselves to the driver who someone had helped out of the car and to the ground in the middle of the street. He had no obvious injuries but from the looks of the car you can assume he had some internal ones. I grabbed cervical spine stabilization on a patient in the front passenger seat. He was all bloody down the front of his shirt but he was talking to me and reeked of alcohol. When you are holding the c-spine you don't let go ever, until they are secured to a device that will keep their neck from moving. So I was stuck. And there was no one around to assess the guy and figure out where the clotted blood had come from.

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I was stuck. If I let go and he had a cervical spine fracture it could paralyze him. So I stayed. But the wasted retard kept moving and trying to get out of the car. As he moved, the blood covered glass shards on his neck started cutting through the gloves I was wearing. I immediately let go - my safety over his, sorry. At this point I yelled to my Sargent that I was cut and tried to keep the guy from actually getting out of the car. He shifted around, stuck his feet out of the door I was blocking with my body and finally decided to lay back into the drivers seat. It was then that I saw where the blood had come from...

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When he leaned his head back all the way and hyperextended his neck, the guy's (luckily in-tact) trachea popped out like a live anatomy lesson. His neck was sliced, I could only assume from the windshield glass. I called for a little help and motioned over the cop who was taking pictured to get this one for me. I know, I am sick. Finally people payed attention to me and we got him out. As I covered the laceration and put pressure on the wound he fought me for a while and then lost consciousness as I gave report and handed him off the the next incoming Medic Unit. I drove the unit to the landing zone where they handed off the patient to the helicopter crew and flew him to the nearest trauma center for some surgical help.

The end of the story? Did he live? I don't know. But I like to think that everyone we send up in the helicopter lives.