Saws All

One of my patients recently had an unfortunate run-in with a reciprocating saw. Somehow, while lowering himself down from a short ladder, he slipped off a rung and fell a short distance onto the saw.
When we arrived, he was outside, covered in blood from the waist down, laying in the grass with an EMT pushing hard on where his leg meets his torso. Holy crap, I thought, he cut his femoral artery!

I started cutting his clothes off and uncovered where the EMT was dutifully holding and found. . .nothing. So I kept looking. There was a heck of a lot of blood, it had to be coming from somewhere. And it was. Lets just say that the saw cut into an important part of his anatomy. (though it was not a 'bobbitt') But, it's probably good news that the patient had already had a vasectomy. After finding the hole, we simply covered it up, and by that time the bleeding had more or less stopped. Although it was a tricky place to bandage. It turned out that his own leg did a good job at holding on the dressings. We found the saw, and the blade was completely covered in blood, so there was no telling how far it went in.
He was surprisingly calm through all this, and we had an uneventful ride to the hospital.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Well, Well, Well

Dueling Blogs