Cars Go Smash

So it's been a while since my last post. I've been pretty busy lately and sort of lost track of this thing but i'm back in action and have a few good stories to share. I'm going to start with a few wrecks. We get a lot of car accidents in my area, granted most of them are bullshit like the typical "pulled over in the parking lot with a tiny dent on the car but all of a sudden have severe back and neck pain so they can collect insurance money scheme". We went to one the other day with these two fat ladies that bashed their cars upside each other leaving the smallest amount of damage and of course both wanted to go to the hospital. It was 90 something degrees outside and here we are pulling these two gigantic hypochondriacs out of tiny cars as they both are having massive panic attacks. We were all sweating our asses off trying to pull them out when in reality, they were probably fine enough to walk their fat asses over to McDonalds and grab a few cheeseburgers for the free government taxi ride. To make it even better, we had just come from ladder training so the heat was already taking it's toll on us. Lifting these two fat screaming women in the middle of a hot busy street was definitely not making it better.

The first winner on my car accident post is this guy who crashed into...well take a look for yourself.

Yep that's right folks.. Crashed into a truck parked in a driveway. A brand new truck at that. No one was hurt when we got there but the driver of that sweet Lincoln was high as a kite. He came barreling down the street, probably jamming to some thug life and went up on the curb, hit a little tree, and took out the pretty truck. Good job buckaroo, i'm sure the clique is proud of you. Hopefully it won't be hard to replace that fancy chrome over the wheel wells.

This next wreck was dispatched as an ejection over on a busy road near the station. We showed up first and found the driver laying face down on the sidewalk about 25 feet from the car. I get over to the patient who honestly looked dead and started asking if he could hear me. This guy picks his head up and hands me a phone then tells me to call some chick. I asked if he was alright and again he told me to call this chick. I told him I didn't care about his phone, I was trying to make sure he was ok. Apparently he was just fine after smashing the shit out of his car and flying 25 feet. We took him to the hospital as a precaution but damn, bones of steel. He wasn't even drunk that we know of. He was allegedly texting while flying down the road and lost control into the fence.

This last one may not look as bad as the fence wreck but had a completely different end result. As soon as we pulled up to this one, we realized that the two right side front and rear passengers were trapped in the car. To make matters worse, the 80 something year old woman in the back was slumped over and not breathing. We called for a rescue truck and we started pulling tools out of our pumper. We got the back door open and I grabbed the lady and yanked her out to the ground. Normally we do not do CPR on traumatic arrests but I had a gut feeling that this case was different. She was very old and frail with no visible signs of trauma so my first thought was that she may have had a heart attack from being in the accident. We got her on the ground and started CPR until the cavalry showed up then went to work on the other patient in the front. Her leg was actually caught in the door so we had no choice but to cut the door off and pull her out that way. She was banged up but was nowhere close to her family member in the back. That was another reason why I suspected heart attack, not to mention that the car really doesn't look bad enough to cause a fatality. 

I wasn't in the ambulance with the CPR but from what I hear, as soon as they tubed her, blood was violently coming out of her mouth. There was definitively internal injuries and it was not a heart attack as I first suspected. I suppose as old and frail as she was, her body just was not strong enough to take an impact like that. I was later questioned by the EMS supervisor why we elected to work her instead of calling her death but my theory is that I would rather have worked her with the slight possibility that it was a heart attack then not tried at all. She was already dead so I don't think working her really hurt anything. If it was my family member, I would be happy to know that the crews at least tried their best than just looked at her and said "eh, she's dead". Especially with no signs of traumatic injury.