AlejAndro Anastasio has a web site titled One Hand Speaks. On November 14, 2017 I blogged about listening to his podcast. Starting on January 1st of this year he is writing 40 blogs about his 30 podcasts. To celebrate that I have a one-handed story to tell him and you from four decades ago.
Back in the seventies (1972 – 1978) I was a medic in the Air
Force Reserve. For the last year I worked one weekend a month in the hospital
at the Selfridge Air National Guard Base near Detroit. On a Saturday morning in
early summer both the Tactical Hospital unit I belonged to and the
corresponding Air National Guard unit were sharing that same old red brick hospital
building.
That Air Guard was doing a disaster exercise. Back on September
11, 2012 I blogged about Disasters and triage. Now, it is very hard to make an
exercise seem real. You need to shake people out of their mindset that This Isn’t
Real – It’s Only a Drill.
In that blog post I mentioned an exercise I’d gone through
in tech school down in Texas. They set the scene up as a plane crash after
sundown – in a cow pasture outside of Burkburnett. We got dropped off the back
of a truck and told to run over a hill. There was a broken fuselage lit only by
burning jet fuel. A bunch of ‘victims’ were made up with realistic looking prefabricated
rubber wounds or burns – a branch of special effects known as moulage. Some
were moaning, and others were screaming. It smelled, sounded, and looked real.
But how would you make your ‘disaster’ seem real on a sunlit
morning? One of the guardsmen had a teen-aged cousin I will call George. His
right arm stopped above the elbow. George came out to Selfridge with his
cousin. He had volunteered to be the first ‘victim’ the medics would encounter.
George wore a tank top and shorts, and they made his right arm up as a fresh
amputation. It looked startlingly real, so it worked beautifully.
His cousin took George around the hospital to show my
reserve unit their makeup masterpiece. George was grinning from ear to ear. He
said this had been more fun than he’d ever had on Halloween.
The military ambulance image came from Wikimedia Commons.
This is such a great story Richard. I have done similar activities with wilderness back-country first aid training. Not to the high quality make you are referring to in your story. I have also had a lot of fun with having one hand for Halloween and other custom parties. Life with one hand can be quite fun with a good perspective. Thanks for sharing the story and info about my website and "40 Blogs in 40 Days about 40 Podcast" campaign.
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