Yeah, this totally didn't need to happen. And now you have hospital bills. Don't you feel great?
Accidents happen, sure. But sometimes an "accident" is the result of too much negligence, or something dumb, or just overall complete lack of care for yourself and others that results in injury. If you were an emergency responder, what do you imagine you might come across?
u/chocolateskittle asked:
Here were some of the most intense responses.
Hmmm....
Some guy decided kicking a running mower blade that was jammed up was a great idea. He was nice enough to bring his foot in though... in a cooler full of beer.
If I Only Had A Brain
There was an SUV full of teenagers driving down the highway in busy traffic. They are driving pretty aggressively. They try to pass a truck but the truck is towing a trailer and can't slow down quickly enough to let them pass before oncoming traffic gets close, so they slow down and try to make a second pass. The fifteen year old in the back seat decides to pull his pants down and hang his ass out and moon the other car. Once they passed, they overcorrected and rolled. The kid doing the mooning was ejected.
Wear A Dang Helmet
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I'm a paramedic. Saw a woman very messed up due to the lack of wearing a helmet on a job site. A big metal beam fell on her head and then landed on her legs, below the knee. Ended up having one leg with a completely broken set of bones beneath the knee (tib-fib for those keen to the lingo). She was super disoriented and had memory problems while I was taking care of her. Would forget everything every 5 ish minutes, and would want to take the splinting off her leg when that happened. Pretty crazy!
That Ain't No Friend
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I met a guy while I was in the hospital ER that was getting out after suffering a stab wound to his leg. I asked him what happened and he told me that his friend stabbed him with a carving knife. I asked him why he would do something like that, and he replied, "We were both drunk and decided to see if I could feel it." At least he had a sense of humor about it.
Dad's Stories
My dad is a police officer on a local highway where a guy had lost control of his uhaul and flipped it. He wasnt wearing a seatbelt and was ejected. He landed (most likely already dead) and the truck came to rest on his head. Only his head.
The List Just Goes On, And On....
25 years in the fire service. Pick one :
(a) dropping your crack pipe into your bed and burning off all your skin, and a lot of skin.
(B) getting drunk and hitting a tree sideways with your grand Cherokee so hard that the frame rails met on the other side. Oh, and not being identified for four days because all you had was fake ID.
(C) stopping your car on the side of I-95 to piss at 2 AM, getting out on the traffic side and getting waffled by a truck.
Seriously, f*cking drunk drivers. Nothing beats getting out of bed at 1AM, spending five hours watching the staties do their investigation, THEN going to work on two hours sleep.
Those Airbag Warnings Are Real
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My cousin is an emt and he said one of the nastiest scenes he came upon was a car accident in which the passenger had both of her legs up on the dash. Air bags deployed causing severe fractures on both of her ankles and pushed her knees into her face causing breaking her eye socket. He said she was fully conscious when he arrived and in incredible pain. If I remember correctly she survived and was expected to make a full recovery. He has a lot of crazy stories.
My Hands Hurt Reading This
A theater was being renovated. The theater was designed for a specific show, and that show left after something like a 15 year run. One of the design quirks of the theater was a concrete basement underneath the stage, where machinery would push up some pretty impressive set changes from below. This means the stage had giant open holes in it after all that machinery and stuff was cleared out of the basement. The holes in the stage opened up to a 30 foot drop with bare concrete beneath.
The crew who was tearing down the stuff on the stage took some precautions to make sure nobody fell into those holes. They put plywood over the holes, and set up caution cones all around them.
When they finished tearing down all the stuff on the stage, the last things remaining were those cones and plywood. Someone picked up all the cones, and it was our future-patient's job to pick up the plywood. These were long sheets of plywood - too big to just throw over his shoulder. So he just picked up one side of the plywood sheet and started walking forward, pushing it along the stage floor.
He never even saw the hole he fell through, because the plywood he was pushing blocked his view of his own feet. He fell 30 feet and tumbled on the way down, landing directly only his outstretched hands. He had multiple nasty compound fractures in both arms. Luckily the shattering bones of his arms broke a lot of the momentum, so when his head smashed into the concrete it wasn't enough to kill him.
He woke up while we were prepping him for ambulance transport. He mumbled something to us, mostly due to his injury but also due to the spinal immobilization we put on him, which tucks underneath the chin. He kept mumbling "maaa haaaaa. maaa haaaa huuuu."
After awhile, I realized he was trying to tell us that his hands hurt. Which makes sense. You know, considering the circumstances.
What A Blade
A friend of mine who works on a surgical ward says that she sees a surprising number of people who try to slice a bagel with their finger through the hole.
So, uh, you know, in general, it pays to stay off autopilot when you're wielding a knife.
Pumpkin Season
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I was a firefighter and we were called to a vehicle fire at midnight in a rural area. We get there and sure enough there was a pick-up truck fully engulfed. This wasn't the usual engine compartment fire, the whole truck was roaring. I was was the nozzleman at the time on my engine, which meant my job was to be the guy spraying water on the fire.
As I got closer to the pick-up, I noticed a god awful smell. I was relatively new, so I couldn't place it, but just knew it was putrid. My heart immediately sunk when I remembered there was a missing girl case in our area. People often stash evidence inside cars and burn the whole thing to get rid of evidence. Guns, clothes, even bodies.
As I'm putting out the fire, I'm dreading what I'll find. Something was in the truck bed. The fact that the truck's owner wasn't on scene made me more nervous.
Fast forward and the fire's out. Turns out the truck bed was filled dozens of pumpkins. Thankfully no bodies, but we had no idea where the driver was.
A few days later we heard from the cops that just before we arrived at the fire, a lone guy showed up at the ER with massive, full-body burns. Turns out that as this guy was driving his pumpkins to a nearby farmers market, he hit something in the road. His gas gauge went to empty and he smelled gas coming from his truck. The hero of this story crawled under his truck to assess the damage and used the only light source he had --- a bic lighter. Someone saw the fire and drove him to the ER. Some separate passer-by was the one who actually called in the fire.
