Urgent! Urgent! Urgent! Urgent! Emergency!

Ha ha, not really.

Wow, I’m behind.  I meant to write this about a week and a half ago.  Slacker.

So, a couple of weekends ago, I volunteered to be a victim in a MASS CASUALTY INCIDENT!  Fortunately it was a big fake mass casualty incident.  Tina is taking an EMT course, and all the students had to bring volunteers so they could practice their skills. 

In the morning, my injuries included a gunshot wound to my arm, and an amputated leg.  Fun, huh?!  They had fake plastic injuries that we could strap on to ourselves, and that’s what I picked, at least for the first go-round.  There were somewhere between 20 and 30 people with varying degrees of “injury” and mental responsiveness, spread out on the upper and lower level of the health building at the community college.  I decided to be injured on the upper level so that all the EMT students could practice carrying a big girl down the stairs on a backboard.  During the first practice round, though, since I had “one good leg” (never mind the missing leg), that these 2 kids could just walk me down the stairs!!  (I say kids, even though their ages ranged from 21 to 60-something…)  The second round, I moved my arm injury to my “good leg”.  Ha!  No walking me down the stairs that time!  I was strapped onto a back board with about 14 people carrying me down the stairs.  Okay, maybe it was only 6 people.  But still. 

It was SCARY!  And FUN!  Like a fun scary carnival ride that is over way to quick, and accompanied by that fear that any second, the straps are going to break and you’re going to go crashing to the ground!  Especially when they’re all yelling at each other, “You’re going to drop her!” and “She’s sliding off!” and “Pick up her feet!”  All in all, I feel relatively certain that the fake mass casualty incident was way funner than a real one would be.  Plus I was able to pick up a few minutes here and there to read my book.

In the afternoon, I transitioned from traumatic injury to being a 66-year-old woman having a heart attack.  Did you know that heart attacks in women can present as back pain?  That’s just one of the good things I’ve learned while Tina’s been in this class.  I’ve also learned that you really should always wear clean underwear AND shave your legs, cause you never know what those medics are going to have to cut off of you in an emergency…