07 August 2009

"You See A Lot of Bad Stuff, Don't Ya?"

Yes.
The point of the service is to move folks with big problems quickly to get life-saving, maybe life-changing care. All EMS folks are exposed to ugly injuries and sickness. Helicopter EMS people, by definition, get to see more of the worst cases.
This one was ugly and tragic-

"Your patient is a 32 yr. old female. Her arms were caught up in, crushed and burned by the machine she was operating."

Replacing a sick fellow employee, she was operating a machine with which she was not familiar. Her job was to put cardboard containers of product into a stream of shrink-wrap plastic and run both through a set of extremely hot rollers to encase the individual product containers in weather-proof plastic. She somehow got both arms into the hot rollers, burning the muscles on both to the bone.
A Mother of three trying to make some extra cash for the family, she'll no longer be able to feel the warmth of her kids faces as she wipes away their tears.

Try to be careful out there folks.

2 comments:

cary said...

Oh, man.

Prayers for her and her family.

CJ said...

I'm with you, Cary. How unbelievably sad.

cjh