A spirit-lifting post

[Guest guest]

Dear List Members,

Every once in a while I post something written by a physician from another

list that gives hope that there are at least a few physicians out there who

think about things.

Here is the post:

> A cut in the femoral artey can cause lethal blood loss within

>seconds, with perhaps a

>couple of minutes more to die.

When I was in college I got a job for the summer feeding wood into a

rip saw in a furniture factory in Toccoa, Georgia. Would have been

1964 I think. I took pieces of wood off the conveyer belt and fed

them into the saw which was pre-set for a certain size. The wood

zipped through the saw and another guy on the other end grabbed it

and put it in a bin that someone else regularly emptied.

Back in those days labor in Georgia was rather different than it is

now. The factory was filled with sawdust in the air. The only fans

were exit blowers in the ceiling. It was incredibly hot. So hot

everyone was bathed in sweat. It was incredibly loud. You had to

yell into someone's ear to be heard.

US$65.00 a week for five 8 hour days. Straight up. No benefits of

any kind. Men supported a family of five on that. If you got hurt

and couldn't work you got let go. Any talk of unions had a strong

potential to get the discussant severely beaten or an unfortunate

accident somewhere along the line.

At any rate, the saws were open blades and had an evil " kickback "

habit. Sometimes the wood would shatter and the blade would snap

shards of it back at the operator. The operator wore a think rubber

apron. I was nailed on several occasions but never injured. It was

an occupational hazard of the job. One day a saw snapped a spike of

wood back that went through the apron of the operator on the saw

right next to mine. Nailed him dead center in a femoral artery and he

proceeded to bleed like a stuck pig. Passed out. Ambulance crew in

a big Cadillac hearse painted white picked him up and hauled him to

the hospital. There was no such thing as Basic Life Support. They

called them " ambulance attendants " and their job was just to pick up,

put on a stretcher and haul. The wound was never touched other than

to put a sandbag on it. As I recall, it continued to bleed around the

sandbag. The rest of us went back to work.

My father the general surgeon was at the hospital. As I heard later

the man had a blood pressure of 50 and was no longer bleeding. At

least 45 minutes had transpired. Large clot in the femoral artery

that (after cross clamp) when removed revealed open artery on both

sides. He debrided and repaired it in some fashion I wouldn't have

understood at age twenty something. The guy lived and eventually

went back to work. He was the one that originally told me both the

clot and survive after any arterial injury rule. Safar

confirmed it again many years later.

The human body is a wondrous thing that is genetically programmed to

survive. And the compensatory devices that facilitate that survival

are stand alones. the best way to help is to quit trying to improve

on the compensation and fix the underlying problem ;-). This

principle is shown in hypothermia as victims developed a fine balance

of suspended animation. they will stay alive that way indevinitely or

until someone tries to intubate them or do CPR on them after which

they go into terminal VFIB and die. Dr. [name deleted for privacy] has

discovered

this fact in his theory of not giving trauma patients volume. The

statistics clearly show that every time you do that, outcome is

worse. Nature's compensatory devices work best when not manipulated

by man maybe.

Regards,