[zx10guy]

Two stories come to mind from my days as a first responder.

First one. Another fire company was called on scene first for a single car motor vehicle wreck. We were later called out for mutual aid as there were multiple patients requiring advanced care. My station is the only one available with paramedics. We arrive on scene. The squad truck from my station was there cutting the A pillar of the car to peel back the roof to extricate the driver. The car was sitting in someone's front yard. The passenger was a few feet away from the car laying in the yard with the first medic unit from my station doing CPR on him. My unit was waiting on the driver.

What caused the wreck after all the details came out from the investigation, the occupants of the car was celebrating the birthday of the passenger. Both were intoxicated. The driver was operating the car severely impaired. Add to the mix the day before, we had snow. So from the melting during the day, there was some black ice on the road. The car was traveling at a high rate of speed when it went over the black ice, hit a snow bank, and was launched into the air. The car was about 8 feet in the air based on the marks on the tree the car hit while airborne. The passenger side struck the tree where by the passenger's head was thrown out the window opening for the door. His head impacted the tree trunk and was pulled back with significant force. The crew doing CPR on him said with each compression, his neck was swelling and deflating. This was caused from the carotid artery and jugular vein being ripped open. He also suffered other massive trauma as evidenced when we arrived to the trauma center with the driver. While we were transferring the driver to the hospital's bed in the trauma room, I looked over and saw bright red pouring out from the chest tube one of the ER staff had just stuck into the side of the passenger.

The whole scene was depressing as there were stuffed animals and birthday presents strewn all over the road.

Second story has to do with some sort of bad karma.

My unit was about to go off shift when we heard the request from dispatch about any available unit to respond to a motor vehicle wreck. My driver statused we were available and we took the call. Upon arrival to the scene there were two vehicles involved. The fire company had already closed off the road in both directions to create an LZ for the medevac to land. My unit was to attend to the noncritical patients. There was one critical patient. A 8 year old boy that was ejected from the vehicle from the impact. Apparently, the car with the 8 year old boy was making a left turn at an intersection, the striking vehicle was traveling at an extreme high rate of speed and T-boned them. The impact was so severe, the car with the 8 year old boy was thrown from the intersection and stopped about 15 or so feet from the intersection on the sidewalk/grassy area. I was loading the mother and the sister of the 8 year old boy into my rig. I was also about to load the driver of the other vehicle into the back with us as we were going to transport him to the hospital too. While doing this, I looked over and saw the medics doing chest compressions on the boy has they were moving him into the chopper. Not good. The mom was hysterical and I had to lie to her about the situation to calm her down for her daughter's sake. The battalion chief stopped me before I loaded the other driver into the cab. He told me to put him up front next to the driver. This wasn't SOP and I asked why. He said it's better for him to sit up front because he's a relative of the family he hit.

Just remembered some more I was on. This call we were initially dispatched for a DOA and then was notified the patient was still alive. Arrived on scene with lots of cops and two people in custody. Went into the apartment and before I walked into the apartment I can smell the strong smell of iron....ie lots of blood. The patient was screaming. He had already been packaged by the BLS unit that responded from my station before we had been dispatched. I can see a large blood splatter on the wall and bits of grey stuff all over which were parts of the patient's brain. The back story was the guy got into an argument with his roommates and then one of them decided to settle the argument with a sledge hammer to the back of the victim's head. What saved the guy's life was the fact his head was cracked open so he could bleed out. On top of the strong smell of blood, I had to deal with the strong smell of bowel movement as that is what happens when someone suffers from severe head trauma. The other call I just remembered was a pedestrian versus taxi cab incident. Guess who got the raw end of the deal? The pedestrian was royally messed up. I can see immediately he had a femur fracture as evidenced by the shorter length of the one leg and the bulging of his thigh. What I didn't know until I got his boot off and did a secondary assessment was he also had an open fracture near his ankle of his tib/fib. I can see right into his leg and see the broken bones. You never knew how white bone can be until you see something like this.

Another call, which I wasn't on but was on duty at the time at the station. Our ALS unit was dispatched for a two vehicle collision. Turned out to be a fatality on scene where they immediate pronounced the driver dead. What had happened was a person driving a minivan was proceeding into an intersection and had the right of way. A delivery truck blew the stop sign and crashed into the minivan on the driver side. The way the impact occurred, the force caused the minivan to smash into the side of the truck as if it was making a sandwich. At the same time, the air bags deployed. With the combination of the impact and the air bag deployment, the driver's head was pushed out the open side window and the driver's head was smashed between the two vehicles.