LOR is A&Ox4

SO! As a few of you have seen (if you're my friend on FB), I'm having a BLAST in my WFR course. There is so much that I'm learning just all around me. My instructors are incredible. The area (while it's cold, I thought about moving here... and now I'm kinda deciding against it!) is BEAUTIFUL! I love just about everything here. Let me catch you up to speed on the stuff I've been doing and try to explain the title of my post so you get an idea about what exactly I'm doing and what it's going to be good for.

I'm getting training to become WFR certified. WFR stands for Wilderness First Responder. It is good for me to have this skill while working at ANASAZI. After having two injuries while I was out in the field, and not feeling completely confident in my first aid training (I knew the idea behind making splints, but I had no idea how to execute them) I thought it was about time I did something to help make me feel more confidant out in the field/wilderness, hence the training.

There is so much that I'm learning, it feels like there are a hundred acronyms for me to learn. LOR is Level of Responsiveness, A&Ox4 is how alert and oriented they are, if they can tell me their name, where they are, about what time of day it is and what happened to them. If they can't tell me what happened, it's not completely concerning, still something to be concerned about, but not to freak out about. If they can't tell me their name, then I'm going to be a little bit more concerned. Those are just a few. I know how to splint properly, I know how to take care of head wounds (opened and closed ((closed wounds are the scariest of the all, especially if there is bleeding from the ears, mouth or nose and they're unresponsive to pain and verbal stimuli))), I know how to do TIL (traction-in-line) splints, do steri-strips, and the list of what I can do goes on and on!!!

My favorite part is when we get to go out and be the victims (hey, someone's gotta be the dummy!). We're split into 3 groups and we rotate so everyone gets a chance to do just about everything. So far I've had head trauma


Then I got to practice my steri-stripping



Practiced taping ankles (I'm a pro at this from my basketball days!)


And my favorite accident so far, was when a ladder collapsed underneath me and I "fractured" my leg and scraped up my arms.





This is from a dislocated shoulder, which, I actually did dislocate so that my "rescuers" would have to pop it back in!



This one is when Grandma Gertrude beat me with her cane at the pancake breakfast because I didn't give her enough butter (bad for her heart, just sayin) and I ended up with a fractured Radius Ulna, Thanks Gurdy!




These two are from our night scenario where I fractured my tib-fib. We were out in the cold for 3 hours, and I coincidentally ended up having to pee about half-way through... real life. Can you say AWKWARD? especially because there was only one other girl in my group!? yeah... oh the fun!


And then I shattered my knee cap... pretty fun and intense stuff going on here!!

See!? I'm having SUCH a blast! On Wed, we did a mock rescue where the brought in the fire trucks, ambulances AND a life flight helicopter. The scenario was that there were 5 victims and they were rafting and their raft flipped and people got hurt. 4 of the victims were in the water, and one was running around telling everyone else to go take care of the other people who were seriously injured. We wanted to make sure there weren't anymore victims (that's key!), but I wasn't key on getting into the water (I can be super smart sometimes!), and ended up with the victim who was going crazy! We finally got him to sit down, and as soon as we got him to sit down, he went COMPLETELY unresponsive. Ultimately, we figured out he had a closed head wound and needed to be evacuated immediately. We had to figure out how to keep him stable for an HOUR AND A HALF!!! It's almost like what do we do!? We took vitals, secured his spine and neck, put him on a backboard, and then kept trying different things to see if he responded to anything, but he was completely unresponsive to everything we did. Then, a helicopter, a REAL helicopter came and took him away. It was so awesome. I'm so in love with what I'm learning and what I might get to do at some point in my life with this training. It's something I would suggest for just about anyone who does stuff in the back country, or wants to be a paramedic or EMT. It's wonderful! LOVE LOVE LOVE!! I've only got a few more days left until I head back to AZ, and I'm super excited about that, but bummed I won't be doing stuff like this all day every day.... maybe I'll take a WEMT (wilderness EMT) class in the bay in March... I guess time will only tell!

<3 the girl who's LOR is A&Ox4