Day 8 - Day 3 on the Cruz Verde Norte Ambulancia

So again today I mixed shifts, started at 14:00 and finished at 03:00. In total I attended 8 calls, the first being the transfer of one of the patients from last night with a traumatic head injury to the intensive care unit at one of the larger hospitals.

Shortly after returning from the transfer we attended a motorcycle crash (shown below). The motorcyclist was perfectly fine, however the car driver had somehow ripped a couple of his nails from his fingers, causing considerable pain. The fingers were cleaned and dressed on the scene.

As we left the motorcycle crash, we then received another call, this time for a fall. However, on arrival it actually turned out that the 16 year old patient had actually dislocated the right patella. I was asked if I knew how to re-locate the patella, and explained that I had seen it done many times but not done it without the supervision. Surely enough one of the paramedics bent, then straightened the knee whilst I popped the knee cap back into position. Almost immediately the pain stopped for the patient, and after dressing the knee in a bandage, we left him on scene.

The next call was a for a middle aged woman who had a headache, there was no evidence to support it being anything more, but she was insistent on going to hospital so we ended up taking her anyway. (she was discharged from the hospital about half an hour after arrival)

We attended yet another car accident (shown above) but fortunately neither of the occupants was injured, what you cannot see in the photo, is that if they ended up about 2 meters to the right of where they were, they would have dropped about 30ft to the bed of a dried river.

The next call was a little more difficult as it was to a sexual assault on a middle aged female. The police were already on scene and there was no physical injury to the woman. The only thing that could be done was to provide emotional support, and as I do not speak the language very well and it was more appropriate for a female to speak to the woman, I left my colleague to talk and comfort the woman.

The final call of the night was to a fall in the street. The 26 year old had in fact fractured his tibia, and with the use of the cardboard in the ambulance, I splinted the lower leg, before we took him back to the emergency department for x-rays and further treatment.

Another great day, maximising my hours on the road in order to get the most possible hours of my clinical placements done before heading back to the UK.