Thursday

The day started with a bleeding and screaming student.  The basic idea was to give us, the instructors, a bit of the medicine we have been dishing out for the past two and a half weeks and to watch and see how we would handle the emergencies we are asking them to manage.  It's fair and fun and Bren survived, albeit with some lingering tenderness on his leg where he had a tourniquet applied.

The day proceeded with instruction in bleeding management, including use of said tourniquets, hemostatic (clotting) agents, and pressure wraps.  In no other field of prehospital emergency care has so much changed so recently.  Gone are the days of elevating bleeds.  Gone also are the use of pressure points and raising a patient's feet above their head.  All have been shown to be either useless or harmful.

The day ended with a full afternoon of practical examinations, including navigation, knots, and medical scenarios.  With four full-time instructors on site, we are able to give a lot of personal instruction and feedback.  

OTHER THOUGHTS:  IMPROV, 101

We always learn from our students.  Every now and then, their ideas really stun us.  The photo below is  an idea that we have not seen before in any manual but that we believe would work incredibly well.  Best of all, it was thought up by a Semester student, Sam Dougherty.  It's a chest seal with a one-way valve created by taping a CPR face-shield over a sucking chest wound. The face mask would allow air to escape out of a chest wound but not permit air to rush back into the chest during inhalation.  Brilliant! It looks very, very much like models that we carry on the ambulance (Asherman model), but meets the standard for being carried in a backpacking first aid kit: it has more than one function and it's lightweight.  

A photo of Jeanie's, the students' dorm.  

Tomorrow we head back into the forest for more extended scenarios that combine skills taught to date.  Students will need to locate patients with GPS coordinates, access them in difficult terrain, stabilize their injuries and prepare for an extended evacuation.  We will all sleep well tomorrow night!