Chapter Twelve
I could almost see how people might find this sort of job fun. The chance to stage car crashes in the middle of the night, complete with tomato sauce wounds and fake drunk patients, was probably reasonably entertaining for individuals more adventurous than me.
Abel was fully into work mode and it was almost as though the intensity of our interaction only minutes before hadn’t happened.
We discussed if we could do without Felix for the scenario, but unfortunately decided we did need a few more team members to prepare for the multi-trauma, so Felix was woken up, along with Lilly and Dylan, the leader of the guides.
The scenario involved the onsite crashed car, the minibus and a broken bicycle. Once everything was positioned, Abel gathered us for the briefing.
‘Thank you for getting out of the warmth of your beds to help us with our mass casualty event. We’ll have five patients, including our mannequin baby, and one person overseeing the scene to help guide our participants.’
He described the roles: a pedestrian, a cyclist, the driver of the minibus and the driver of the crashed car, with her baby.
‘So given that I spent the day lying in the mud, I assume you are going to take the role of acting and I get to oversee things?’ I said sarcastically to Abel when the others were studying the state of the crashed car.
He shrugged. ‘Seems fair.’
‘Are you serious? I thought you’d need to be the big, important leader?’
‘Absolutely not.’ He smiled. ‘Much more fun acting. You run it.’
I hadn’t expected that, and for a moment, I felt totally out of my depth. But I’d been involved in enough courses over the years that I knew the same processes and skills could be applied here.
Abel leant closer and muttered, ‘And what should we do with Felix? Put the log on top of him? Smear his hair with tomato sauce?’
‘And cover him up so no one notices him for the duration of the scene? Sounds excellent.’
It was five minutes to midnight. The casualties were ready and positioned and my first job was to notify the sleeping group of the emergency.
I went to the dorm room and took a deep breath, trying to channel my inner actress.
Then I banged on the door as hard as I could.
‘There’s been an accident! Help!’ Doors started opening and tired, confused-looking course attendees came out.
There was genuine alarm on their faces. ‘There’s an emergency!
’ I yelled. ‘There’s a baby and a cyclist and a car crash with lots of injured people! ’
The attendees started running and following me around the back of the lodge to where the hazard lights on the minibus were flashing with dramatic effect and the smoke machine was pumping haze everywhere.
I nearly laughed when I saw Abel lying on the ground, clutching his leg and yelling loudly, ‘My leg! My leg! I’m dying!’
The group had by now worked out that this was a scenario rather than a real accident, so the panic reduced, but the sense of excitement was maintained.
I watched as the attendees scrambled, overwhelmed by the chaos and trying to work out where to start.
‘We’ve found ourselves in an emergency,’ I said above the noise. ‘Remember the strategies we talked about on the first day. We need to establish roles, find a team leader, think about triaging and prioritising patients who are most sick, and then go through your systematic approach.’
‘My leg! My leg!’ Abel was still carrying on with Oscar-worthy conviction.
‘My baby!’ Lilly was wailing, interjected with impersonated baby cries.
‘That fucking driver!’ Felix yelled. ‘Just came out of nowhere!’
‘My leg!’
‘My baby!’
Even I was finding it hard to have clarity in the situation.
After a few stunned moments, the course attendees elected one of the GPs, Emma, as team leader and established a plan.
‘We’ve got five patients including the baby. Can we have a guide paired up with a doctor to assess each person together?’ Emma called to the group.
‘Have we called for help?’ Jimmy asked helpfully.
‘Excellent idea. I’m on the other end of the phone.’ I held up my hand like an old-fashioned receiver.
Emma gave the synopsis. ‘We have a multi-vehicle accident with five patients involved. We have a mother and a baby who seem largely uninjured, a cyclist with a concerning long bone injury, a minibus driver who hasn’t yet been assessed, and a pedestrian who seems to be crushed under a – log?’
‘What’s your location?’
One of the guides stepped in to help provide the GPS location.
‘And the car is on fire!’ someone yelled.
I walked around the scene, observing. A group of three were taking care of Felix and beside them, two others were assessing Abel. He was singing ‘Walking on Sunshine’ in a slurred, highly convincing, drunk manner between yelps of: ‘My leg! I’m dying!’
I tried not to laugh.
‘Let’s take a look at the leg,’ someone said.
Abel was wearing some pre-ripped jeans that had huge smears of tomato sauce oozing out the upper thigh. Someone called for scissors and started cutting the leg off the pants to better assess the wound.
‘I can’t breathe!’ Abel continued. ‘My leg! It’s so cold! My head is spinning!’
‘The smoke is increasing,’ I said.
‘We didn’t address danger!’ Jimmy cried. ‘Let’s put the fire out! Is there a fire extinguisher?’
‘In the lodge. Someone has grabbed it and you’re using it to put the fire out now. Well done.’
Abel coughed and gasped for air while someone applied a tourniquet to his leg.
Lilly was walking around yelling, ‘My baby! My baby!’ Everyone had come to the conclusion she was just a distraction and had stopped taking notice of her.
I walked into the minibus where three people including the team leader were assessing the driver, who was slumped on the steering wheel. They were looking for signs of life when he started seizing.
‘Let’s get him in the aisle!’ Emma called and a group gathered to lift him into the recovery position. ‘Someone time the seizure! Do we have midazolam?’
The next ten minutes involved the group locating the medical kit, working out how to terminate the seizure and managing his airway as things deteriorated further.
They’d just managed to stabilise the driver when a guide rushed in, yelling, ‘The dude with the leg! He’s unconscious!’
I followed the group out to Abel. He was doing an impressive job of drooling and gasping for breath. They faffed around for a few minutes, trying to work out what was going on and I reminded them to go back to the algorithm if in doubt.
‘How is his airway? Is there vomit?’
‘Yes,’ I said trying not to smile. ‘The drunk man has vomited all over himself.’
They moved him into the recovery position and mimed finger swipes to clear the airway.
‘His airway is now fine,’ I said. ‘But he’s still gasping for breath.’
‘Let’s listen to his chest,’ Emma said.
Someone took the stethoscope from her and listened.
‘No air entry on the right side,’ I explained.
‘Trachea?’
‘Deviated to the left.’
They went on to work out he had a collapsed lung and miraculously performed a perfect decompression, after which Abel launched straight into the bridge of ‘Walking on Sunshine’.
I couldn’t help but laugh. ‘You’re enjoying this way too much.’
Meanwhile, Lilly with the baby was making more noise than ever. ‘Somebody listen to me! My baby isn’t breathing properly!’
Felix had begun groaning and moaning but the team looking after him hadn’t made much progress in establishing his issue.
Abel had decided on giving him an Addisonian crisis, which I’d agreed was suitably obscure.
With any luck, Felix would spend the next few hours lying on the muddy ground while his group tried in vain to resuscitate him.
‘My baby has a rash! Somebody! Help me!’ Lilly was also displaying truly fantastic work on the acting front and others were starting to notice.
‘Okay,’ Emma said. ‘It’s sounding like we’ve got one of our patients deteriorating, who might be a priority now.’
‘Excellent,’ I said encouragingly. Leave Felix to wallow in the dirt.
‘What have you noticed is happening with your baby?’ one of the guides began.
‘She’s making this awful wheezy noise and she’s got this rash all over her body.’
Over the next few minutes they worked out the baby was having an anaphylactic reaction. One of the guides went on to administer the epipen. He did it backwards and would have injected his thumb with adrenaline, but I concluded that was a learning point we could go through in the light of day.
We let the team continue to scratch their heads over Felix and why he wasn’t picking up until he finally got fed up with the situation and called out: ‘Who the fuck suggested I have an Addisonian crisis?’ After which the cortisol was administered and he was allowed to get off the ground.
I hoped his underpants were frozen and his arse had chilblains.
By two a.m., the scenario had wrapped up, the victims either fixed or stable, and I had arrived as the retrievalist to single-handedly save everyone. Naturally.
The group’s faces were a picture of exhaustion and satisfaction, like they’d had fun.
And weirdly, I had too.
I was still awake when Abel got back from the shower. Despite being completely covered in tomato sauce, he’d insisted that I shower first so I could get some rest.
He frowned as he sat on his bed and pulled some thick Explorer socks on. ‘You should be sleeping.’
Indeed I should. It must have been close to three a.m.
‘I’m still … winding down.’ I was on my bed and had spent most of the last ten minutes just staring vacantly at the wall while brushing my hair.
Abel turned his bedside lamp on and switched off the main cabin light so the room was washed with a soft, cosy glow, then pulled his covers back to slip into his bed. He lay on his side, facing me, the blanket right up under his chin.