Frostbite and Fake Blood

After the long day yesterday today felt like a breeze, especially because the material we covered was a little more strait forward, at least for me.  Today we covered wound management, which included some pretty gnarly stuff, like how to control an impaled object that you can't remove from your patient, and how to treat an amputation.  We're lucky to have really awesome instructors for our course, who have the ability to inject some comic relief into our interactions without losing the weight of the situations we're talking about.  Case and point, Lisa referred to the fake finger that popped off of her patient's hand as "little patient."  As in, "we want to take care of big patient, but I can't forget about little patient over here either."  Unlike many things, this was pretty in line with my media experiences.  Clean that little patient and place it in some sterile, damp gauze in a ziplock baggie and keep it cool.

After wounds and lunch (what a combination for one's morning) we got on to environmental issues: heat exhaustion/stroke, dehydration, hyponatremia (low sodium, usually caused by over hydration), hypothermia, frostbite, and non-freezing cold injury (also known as trench-foot).  This section was also fairly familiar to me, although we did some interesting myth busting.  Getting into a sleeping bag naked with a hypothermic patient won't do any harm, and might help them feel more comfortable, but isn't going to be especially helpful in raising their core temperature.  Waiting to pee doesn't make you colder, and you don't lose more heat from your head than from an equivalent sized surface elsewhere on your body. With environmental risks, the focus is definitely on prevention, although treatment is obviously thoroughly covered as well.

I can't tell you how unexpectedly fun this class has been.  Pretending to be a patient (which I did twice today) is a blast, and I finally get to utilize the skills from that acting class I took in college.  Today I suffered a head wound, broke my wrist, and had some internal bleeding!  Even more amusing is watching the reactions to the regular folks walking their dogs through the park, wondering what 10 of us are doing splayed out in the grass with fake blood on our heads while the other 20 crouch over us.

Tomorrow is the last day before our one day weekend, so maybe on Sunday I'll have time to say more about the experience, rather than just the curriculum, of this class.  For now, suffice to say these have been some of the most interesting, affirming, and fun days in recent memory.