WMI Students in Action - letters from our files

Our students come from all walks of life. Many work in the outdoor education and guiding industries, still others are employed by governmental agencies including the National Park Service, the Forest Service and the Department of Defense. Regardless of how our graduates utilize their wilderness medicine training, they all share a profound passion for helping others.

Dan Calvert WMI Wilderness First Responder 2005

Here’s a pretty

quick version of a story for summer 2006.

I was performing a snorkel survey on the Smith River in Northern California 5 months after completing my WFR course. I

work in alternative education, and I had two students and a fisheries biologist with me. We were in a canyon with a road 120 feet up a very steep rocky slope. We were swimming along when we heard a very load crashing noise, we looked back and not 100 feet upstream from us a pickup truck was rolling sideways down this steep slope. It rolled about 6 times and then landed cab down in the river. We immediately saw two people get out, one took a step and fell in the river and started screaming holding his leg, and the other individual was basically running around in circles.

We ran back up stream and swam across the river to where this individual was in the water. He was till screaming and holding his leg, and was barely able to keep his head above water. We were in full wetsuits, and I would guess the water was somewhere in the 50-55 degree range.

After determine there was no one else still in the cab of the truck we got him out of the water, doing our best to support his neck and spine (this was tricky due to wading in swift currents) we got him out to shore. The two were very rattled to put it mildly, and I had to ask/yell at them several times before they told me no one else was in the cab. I then performed an initial assessment, trying to see if he had anything else going on besides his leg. He was obviously in quite a bit of pain. He reported that he had no pain to speak of other than his leg. I then proceeded to rip open his shorts, and look at the inside of his thigh that was causing him the pain. The inside of his thigh was sticking out 5 inches, and it was obvious there was a lot of blood just under the skin. The inside of his thigh was already a dark blue/black. This was my first real emergency situation, other than times when I have been the victim.

My initial thoughts were that he had a ruptured femoral artery, and I remember thinking, “this guy is going to die right in front of me, and there is nothing I can do about it”. I then pulled off his shoe, and determined that he had excellent capillary refill, and had a good pulse. Thank god, it looks like he hadn’t ruptured it after all. At this point we sent one of my students for help. The biologist at this point also offered up that he was an EMT, although he hadn’t done anything up to this point, and continued to take the back seat, which meant I was in charge. I decided that we needed to start traction, so I had the biologist man his foot, and e provided the traction. We had nothing with us except our wetsuits, so it was really not possible to do much other than provide manual traction. I had been monitoring his vitals, and they had all been pretty good, steady strong heartbeat at 80 BPM, breathing strong and regular, AO x 4. He seemed to be doing well.

So long story short, we sat with him for 45 minutes until the rescue crew showed up. They rigged up a z-drag pulley system and put him on a back brace to get him out.

He was incredible lucky to not be hurt worse, and the driver did not have a scratch on him. It turns out the victim was 15 and the driver was 16, and them were both drunk at 11:30 AM. We got up to the top of the hill just in time to see the driver fail a sobriety test, and get in the back of the police car.

We decided to go ahead and finish the survey to get our minds off of what had just happened.

It was amazing, I felt really clear and level headed during the incident, I snapped right into WFR mode, and it really felt like a scenario. It wasn’t until the victim was out of my hands that I got rattled.

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