Sounds Like What He Needs Is An Arm-y Hospital
CONTENT WARNING: Serious Injury (Accident with farm equipment)
In the early 2000s, I took an EMT course where, following the classroom work, we had to complete a certain number of hours of clinical work at local hospitals. For me, one of these was a day in the emergency room at the Naval Hospital. It was a fairly slow day with just minor stuff until an old pickup truck pulled into the turnaround right in front of the ER doors.
A man in his early seventies got out of the truck, grabbed something off the front seat, and started walking toward the ER. As he came around the front of the truck, one of the corpsmen yelled, “Holy s***!” We all looked and realized the man was carrying a human arm. At about the same time, it registered to me that he had no right arm, just a large bloody hole at the shoulder of his shirt.
Luckily, the doctor on duty snapped us all out of staring at the guy by yelling, “Prep for major trauma and Life Flight!” People sprang into action, and I grabbed a bed out of an exam room and wheeled it to the door. We got the patient to lie down on the bed as he came in, and someone took his arm from him.
We cut his shirt off, started IVs, stabilized him, and cleaned the wound while waiting for a Life Flight helicopter to fly him to a different hospital since we were not equipped to deal with this level of trauma. In the meantime, the old man told us what had happened.
He was a farmer and had been working in the field with a large piece of equipment when his arm or sleeve got caught in the machine. Before he knew it, his arm “had been ripped clean off.” Amazingly, he didn’t pass out, and while “it hurt like a son of a b****,” he turned off the equipment, retrieved his arm, threw it into his pickup truck, and started driving.
When we asked where his farm was, we realized it was over twenty miles away. This guy had driven past two trauma centers to get to the Naval Hospital, which was not a trauma center and did not have the capability to take care of him. When we asked why he hadn’t called an ambulance or gone to the closer hospitals, he got indignant and said that he was retired Navy and he was “going to get himself to the Naval Hospital.”
Eventually, the helicopter landed to fly him to one of the hospitals he had driven past, and I was told to go move his truck out of the turnaround and park it. When I got into the truck, I realized it was a manual. That meant that this guy, who had only a left arm, had to reach across his body to shift, presumably steering with his right knee as his left foot would have been pressing the clutch pedal. As this was an early-1980s pickup, the shifter was about two feet long and required significant travel to get between gears. He drove that way for over twenty miles.
