...a night in the woods ends

So I recently left you with the not-so-cliffhangered to-be-continued.

But first, a brief synopsis of what I was doing last week first. Many of us remember taking a first aid course at some point. Maybe it was to get our babysitting certificate when we were 12, maybe it was to become a life guard. Me? I took my first course only 3 years ago. It was a wilderness first aid course, i.e. what do you do when the ambulance is a few hours away or more?

The course was excellent. I'd recommend it to anyone who has 3 days to kill enjoys hiking or biking or skiing or camping or canoeing or ... you get the idea.

Well, these courses expire every 3 years and I thought, while I have the time to take a week off, I may as well upgrade to the first responder course. What's the difference? Well other than taking almost 3 times as long, you get to play with toys and do more detailed patient assessments.

Okay, so because this was a wilderness course (with a lot of situational learning), we had an overnight scenario. After our warm-up, we proceeded down to a lake and "set up camp". Except we
didn't do that. We knew we wouldn't be spending any time there so we didn't really bother with trivial things like tents and fires. We had dinner, and chilled out for an hour or two. Chilling included things like a discussion of whether our instructor was a pirate and one man's randition of Acuna Matata from start to finish. Scary what a 30-year old camp director knows.

We were sitting there for quite a while wondering what was going on. Then, just as the last sun beam trickled over the horizon, we saw a flare shoot over the lake. Show time...we haphazardly get our stuff together, and started to organize. Which team is doing what? Another flare goes off. I guess our instructor thought we were taking too long and was getting impatient.

We had previously divided into 3 teams. One went straight to the north end of the lake where we thought the flares were coming from. My team did a shoreline search. I don't know what the third team did.

After about 10 minutes, my team came across somebody in the water. He was cold and shivering, and of course his clothes were soaked. We pulled him out of the water and called in the other teams for help. We removed his clothes and set up a hypothermia wrap using sleeping bags, tarps, emergency blankets, and rope. Our team started the monitoring the patient and the other two teams went off chasing other flares.

The patient was of course cold. An effect of being cold is that your blood vessels constrict a little. As a result, water is removed from your blood and directed to your bladder. (Ever wonder why you always have to pee after spending time outside in the winter?) So in addition to being cold, a hypothermic is also dehydrated. So water was one concern.

The other concern, of course, is warmth. The usual, intuitive, thought for how to warm somebody up is to put them next to a fire. If the person is actually seriously hypothermic, however, being too close to the fire can be leathal. Napoleon's doctor observed this when trying to invade Russia. The reason is because the blood in the extremeties becomes too warm, and shocks the heart when it is pumped back to the body's core. So the best way to rewarm somebody is to roll them up in blankets and let them warm themselves from the inside. Food is always good for getting your furnace going.

So what's a good backcountry solution? Hot Jell-o! (In liquid form. No need to wait for it to set.) There's a reason Jell-o's part of every hospital meal...it's easy to digest and nutritious. So we are periodically heating water with a camp stove, pouring Jell-o powder into it, and feeding it to our patient. Over time, however, it becomes clear that he is going to need oxygen, too. Our dispatch "radioed in" to 413 squadron asking for help, preferably a SAR-Tech. Of course, we couldn't get that as it would defeat training purposes, but a kit was dropped nearby and we were given its GPS location.

By now, just to give an idea of the time, it's probably about 11 pm.

I went off to find the oxygen at about 12, with a member of another team. It took a while, trying to navigate a maze of trails in the dark, but with the GPS we found it. We also brought back the stretcher and a bunch of blankets, just in case. By now it was probably 1 or 1:30.

After that a slow night of monitoring continued for us until somebody broke their femur (for the sake of the exercise). Breaking one's femur can actually be a life-threatening injury if the leg is not put into traction, so while two of us stayed with the hypothermic patient, the rest dealt with the broken leg. After probably half an hour, things were not going well for the broken leg victim, there was constant screaming and shouting from the group. I decided to go check it out.

That's when I discovered they were dealing not only with a rather big guy (probably weighing about 190 lbs), but also the whole situation was happening on a steep and rocky slope with no good footing. His leg was put into traction and the screaming subsided. The team had a
litter (stretcher) and were preparing to move him onto it so they could get him off the slope. As I approached them I leaned on a tree for support and found it was rotten and that it started to give under my weight. I looked to the bottom of the tree trunk and saw the litter
was secured to it!

I moved myself into a position where I could notify the "climber guy" in our group, who I guessed had secured the litter. Right then, I suddenly hear someone yelling "Traction! Traction!" I almost had to laugh when I saw the wood used for the traction splint was rotten and
had snapped. Three of us worked in rotation to keep his leg in manual traction while a group went and found a new, solid piece of wood. I told somebody about the situation with the rotten tree and that was also dealt with. About 20 minutes later, a new traction splint was put into place, and we started to move him. The in the litter was clearly a little concerned about where he was and that we were moving him, and so I spoke to him a little bit and calmed him
down, reassuring him we'd do it slowly and deliberately. The terrain was not good and it 8 of us about 5 minutes to move him 15 metres. At that point, he was in a stable location. The temperature was about 5 degrees so we decided to leave him there for the night but firt cover him in blankets and a tarp to keep him warm.

By now it was about 3:30. We were all very weary by this point. Our very active day had officially started 19 hours ago. It was about 4 degrees out.

We had two patients that needed monitoring. 4 of us stayed up, two with each patient, and 4 of us went to sleep. I volunteered to stay up, mostly because all my gear was in the hypothermia wrap. My hat and gloves were being used as well. Somebody lent me a tent fly and I sat there, wrapped up in that.

I feel asleep in that time, and woke up in semi-sitting position, shivering at 5:15. I realized I needed to get warm. I stumbled down to where peole were sleeping, and woke up the guy with the -20 sleeping bag. It was his shift for monitoring the patient. I took my boots off and my jacket, and crawled into his sleeping bag. I got one hour's sleep before being woken by the instructor. Time for the debrief.

So, I guess that's one way to spend a Friday night.