86 Proof And Still Number 1

Important Safety Tip

 

$#!^ Happens. And You Brought...?

Summer in SoCal is everything you've heard about. Really.
I'm off for the weekend. Cruising down the street listening to my own song mix. The birds are singing. Not a cloud in the sky. And over there is a white haired woman face down in the street. Not a care in...

WTF? Why is grandma doing the dead fish impression off the edge of the curb?

So I pull over smartly, hop out with my first aid kit from behind the seat, and step over to where she lies.
She is, happily for both of us, conscious and breathing, so we chat.

Turns out moments ago (Why in front of me? Just lucky like that...) she negotiated a tall curb badly coming out of the jewelry store, tripped, with both feet on the curb, and fell to the street. As she's telling me this, and giving the okay for help, I tenderly pull her out of the traffic lane in which she was laying, noting her bilateral ankle pain and tenderness.

(And nota bene, total number of helpful bystanders who come over to assist, in front of three open business...zero, start to finish. Plan on that and you'll never be disappointed.)

I'm in town, and can call 9-1-1 while simultaneously cracking a couple of ice packs, after assuring myself that her feet have good pulses, are warm, and she can wiggle her toes. While also noticing she's probably broken both her ankles, at the tender age of 70-something.

So rather than having to splint both of her lower legs, I can wait the 110 seconds it takes for the city's red-engine pride to arrive, while I gather a quick history and baseline vitals, less BP, because I can hear the truck coming before I could deploy the cuff.

She is gently loaded on a gurney, to be whisked to the local ER, in little more than the time it took to write this, and other than handing the lead paramedic all the meat and potatoes of his run report, I'm done, and ready to depart. It also helps that he and the captain both recognize me from multiple contacts in that same ER, even though I'm not in scrubs at the moment.

The point, gentle reader, is that $#!^ happens anywhere. Are you prepared for that? You'll use a first aid kit in your lifetime one helluva lot more often than a gun, so whether or not you have a CCW and a weapon, where's your aid kits?
D'ya know what to do after you grab it?
Note I said kits, not kit. If you have a weapon, you should have an IFAK/blow-out kit on your body, as well as a mini-kit, and a disasterpiece theatre SHTF kit in the car, 24/7/365.
Mayhem doesn't send warning notices. He just shows up.

 

Can you quickly assess, evaluate, and treat someone you come across who needs medical attention? How about when you go shooting? (Of course, we know you'll never have an accident, because infallibility, but what about all those other jackasses waving guns around? Haven't you seen the bullet holes everywhere but downrange??)

Everybody carries one of these:

Okay, nice, provided you've got contact bars.
Some of you carry one of these:

Cool. Now, use it to stop bleeding. Can't do that?
Maybe it's time for one of these:

And one of these is even better:

 

For some problems, there's no other work around. You simply must have the proper tool, or you can't do the job. And waving your gun, or your arms, (or some other worthless anatomy) at the problem won't fix things.

Please, don't be that guy.
Naked and Afraid isn't even much good as a reality show, but it's orders of magnitude worse as a plan for coping with emergencies.

As a wiser man teaching field medical care once pithily explained,
"If you ain't got a kit, you ain't got $#!^."

 

Not the happiest ending in this case, but better than it could have ended.

 

Life happens. Tag, you're it...

Thought For The Day

If you come to the ER and you remember me, you've been here two times.
If you come to the ER and I remember you, you've been here too many times.

Thought For The Day

"A good shift is one where you get to go pee twice, and neither time is in your pants."

A Reminder: The Seven Stages Of Ebola Reporting

1. What Ebola?
2. EBOLA! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!
3. Don't Worry, the Government has TOP. MEN. on the case.
4. The TOP. MEN. Are Idiots! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!
5. Ebola is killing everyone handy in droves, but they're mostly "just Africans".
6. Continued Ebola Stories upset the editorial bias and the entrenched bureaucracy.
7. What Ebola?

Remember that governing paradigm as the stories on this outbreak wax and wane, while the number of infected and dead climbs inexorably, and right on track with any number of estimates.

There are only two or three pending milestones worthy of note:
1) Collapse of one or more of the three affected counties' governments;
2) Widespread outbreak outside the current 3 (or 4) affected countries;
(note that #1 leads inexorably to #2)
{nota bene that Mali is overripe for this, since their current mode is to assume that no one who dies or has died there anytime since September has Ebola until they're literally shitting their guts out, AND someone official deigns to take notice. Which worked out so well with Imam Ebola the Magnificent. }
3) Any cluster of multiple cases here (or elsewhere in the "first" world) >10 cases nearly simultaneously (because that's my ballpark guess on what would overwhelm anyone's management capability, unless they revert to the West African "no actual treatment" modality, in which case 80+% die) because that's the point when the previous rosy outlook all goes to shit, and reality probably starts to kick in at the level of the average person on the street.

Any one of those takes this up another DefCon level IMHO.
The rest is merely the outbreak continuing to chew its way to one of those eventualities.

Thought For The Day

We can pin our hopes on one of three things:
a vaccine,
development of a means of providing care that dramatically reduces the mortality AND COST of Ebola patients, or
the discovery that there really is a Diagon Alley, wherein we can purchase real magic wand[s].
I'm still thinking the latter is most likely. - Grouch MD, from Comments

Thought For the Day

 

Ebola is like the Lottery:
They're both punishment for people who suck at math.

Thought For The Day

WHY MATH MATTERS LONG AFTER SCHOOL:

Telling people that their chances of getting a deadly disease are one-in-a-million are far from comforting in a metropolis of 8.4 million people.

Thought For The Day

Ebola is Obamacare in action:

You can now go to the high-school dropout TSA minions and get a CT scan, a pelvic and/or proctological exam, and get your temperature taken, and all without any co-pay, as the price for the service has been helpfully added to your ticket already.
This is as close as most Americans will get to a doctor all year.

Thought For the Day

Allowing for the fudge factor of "official" Ebola numbers, and the 8-day lag between numbers from Oct. 8th:

There are more people dead from Ebola in Liberia alone right now, than the total number of people who even had it worldwide one month ago.