Another DOA
 

I don't want to hijack the DOA on my arrival thread, but it reminded me of this account I wrote of a morning about 5 years ago.

It was Friday, February 25, sunny and dry, and the time was about 10:30 AM. I was driving west on I 74 just west of Indianapolis. I was in the passing lane and I believe there were some cars in the slow lane and about 200 yards in front of me was a PT Cruiser. A truck in the slow lane crossed the center line and the Cruiser went left to avoid it. The Cruiser went off the left side of the road and got all four wheels in the grass. I think it got a little sideways there and may have started to roll but it happened fast and there was dirt and grass flying. The truck was ahead of the Cruiser by then. I went to the slow lane and slowed some, but was about 50 yards behind the Cruiser.
The car moved back toward the pavement and suddenly took off like it was launched out of a catapult. It shot in the air and rolled a couple of times in the air, came down flat on the highway and rolled another couple of times. Somewhere in all of this I saw something blue and white shot almost straight up into the air. Somehow I ended up all by myself in the slow lane about 10 yards short of the car, surrounded by the PT Cruiser parts strewn all over the pavement. The Cruiser was lying across the slow lane on its side with the bottom towards me. I called 911 and was hassling with the dispatcher and walking up to the car thinking, “Oh man, what am I going to see on the other side of this.”
When I got around the car there was a girl, maybe mid-twenties, squatting on what would be the driver's window looking at me through either the windshield hole or the sunroof it was hard to tell. She had a bump on her lower lip and a lower tooth was pushed in but she looked pretty much OK. I talked to her but she wouldn't talk, she just sat and shook. Some people came up and someone offered her their cell phone and there was some milling around and I heard someone say, “THAT doesn't look good.”
I looked around and about 20 yards away in the ditch was a pile of something that was blue and white. I started walking over to it and a woman started coming behind me. It was a body - a woman, probably in her 20s. She was what I saw flying out of the car when it was rolling because she was wearing jeans and a white top. It looked like she had landed on the top right side of her head, because there was nothing there, a patch of her scalp about the size of my hand was laying in a pile by her skull. She was laying kind of on her back and on her left hip. I don't know much about first aid, but after 5 years with TJ I knew how to take a pulse. But taking a pulse to measure a heart rate and doing it to see if there IS a pulse are two different things. I thought I felt something weak and irregular. The lady behind me turned out to be a nurse. She took her other wrist and felt her neck and we agreed that there was a weak pulse. The nurse knew CPR started working on her while I monitored her pulse. I only felt a few beats, then nothing. After a while her lower jaw opened a little and she made a couple of choking kind of coughs, then her jaw moved again and that was that. Her lips and the inside of her mouth got darker and darker. The nurse kept asking “How are we doing” and after a while I said, “I think she's gone.” And the lady checked her pulse at the wrist and neck and said “So do I, she's dead.” She had blonde hair and though she was a little heavy she had small hands and slender, graceful wrists. She was wearing eye makeup too.
The nurse disappeared and I never saw them again. All the time we were there with her only one other person came around. A cop walked over and looked at her, didn't even bend over, just stood with his hands in his pockets and looked for a minute and left.
I walked back to the wreck and a cop asked me if she was dead and I said yes. I was standing there and some guy poked me in the ribs and pointed into the back of the car and there was a baby seat. He started to say something, but I shushed him and we looked in the junk in the back of the car and looked under the car. If a 150 pound woman could get thrown as far as that lady did when the car was rolling, a baby could be anywhere. We got some guys together and started searching the ditch. I don’t ever again want to have to search a ditch for a dead baby. We finished the ditch and were walking back to go check the median when someone told us they got the girl talking and she said there were only the two of them in the car. Some guy got her to give him a number and he used his cell phone to call her friend or someone. I thought that was pretty smart.
The ambulance and a bunch of fire trucks showed up and the cop that watched us when we were with the dying girl said, “There's a deceased female there and an injured female in the vehicle.” I thought, “How does he know she's dead? He's taking my word for it and I don't know anything about dead people.” So I told the EMT he ought to check her.
Something I found strange was that a lot of cops showed up very soon, but all they did was direct traffic. They never took charge of anything. When the cop came over to the dying woman I thought, “Great, somebody who knows something.” But he just looked and walked away. We were debating about whether to get the girl out of the car or not I was hoping one of the cops would know the best thing to do. I said we should leave her in there and they didn't say a thing. I hope it was the right thing. They left it up to me and a couple of other guys with no experience to take charge of what to do with the people in the wreck.
What weird day. One minute I was driving along thinking about this talk I have to give and a few minutes later I was kneeling in a cold ditch holding a strange woman's arm as her life slipped away. I got on the Indianpolis newspaper’s web site and found out the woman’s name was ------------ and she had two kids.
The Mercedes had two damaged tires from driving over the PT Cruiser parts and they went flat before I got to Peoria.

OMG. Wow dude. That sucks.

When I was a kid, I was the first on an accident scene as well. I was only 16 years old. Drunk driver hit a family head on. The dunk driver died but so did the mom and one of her kids. I walked up to the family’s car and I will never forget it. I am not going to go into detail, it was a gruesome sight.

Do u ever wish you could erase a memory?

like Patrick wrote..
you don't forget the bad ones..
the saves make the folks that work these come back for another day..

we stress having a extinguisher on board our P's..
how many of you carry a good first aid kit..?
or have taken a first aid course..?
EMT Basic's is great resource for anyone..
perhaps a chance to play Dr. again..:)..
folks the basic are so simple..
that not knowing them..
can easily turn tragic..

Rika

Every day.

Worst thing I ever saw in my life was a wreck at the corner of my street and the state hwy in Montgomery County, TX. Minivan full of kids vs drunken asswipe in a Lincoln Mark V. Only one that lived was the guy in the Lincoln who crossed the center line. Trust me, you don't want to hear any details, still have nightmares about it occasionally and that was like 15 years ago.

Damn that makes for a rough day for sure

I work in IT and I have had the misfortune to be the first on the scene of 4 fatal accidents - only one was still alive / conscious by the time I got to the car - he basically drowned in his own blood - you could hear his lungs filling up

The last one I came up on involved a SUV that flipped multiple times right in front of me. Stuff was thrown everywhere along the road - it came to a stop upside down - the roof had collasped, her kneck was so badly broken I believe her head was close to being severed - I started to look to see if anyone else was in the car and that is when I saw the child car seat. My heart stopped - thankfully she was alone

My father-in-law's a paramedic...I don't know how they deal with it, I guess you become a little numb after a while?

One of my first jobs back in the early 70s was shooting pictures at the accident scenes. Most of the times the bodies were gone but the gore was still there. I saw so many crashes where the driver and passengers stuck their head through the windshield because they did not have on a seat belt I vowed to never drive without a seatbelt again.

I had to deal with a 3 car head on accident this past November the day before Thanksgiving in a school crosswalk. The school board hurriedly installed a crosswalk and ceased busing in our development rather than layoff one of 12 vice principals. A few students crossed through the walk about a minute and a half before an SUV rear ended a Dodge Neon stopped at the crosswalk, forcing the Neon through the walk and into the on coming lane of traffic which was moving at this point. The speed limit is 35 on this road. They estimate the SUV was well above 50 and accelerating at the time of the collision. The SUV driver walked away. The Neon driver wasn't so lucky. I'm not sure about the other driver. We have been fighting the board since the summer that the walk is unsafe.

The worst though was when I was a kid. A motorcycle came out of a side street near our house and was T-boned by a car. I heard the accident and looked in the direction of the sound. It looked like the guy exploded. The EMT's put him on a body board it looked like a piece of varnished ply wood with holes around the edge for handles. Two or three times they put him on the board and tried to lift him up and he would slide off form the blood on the board. I got sick for about ten minutes. I don't ride motor cycles.

I was traveling south on 465 around Indianapolis in 1995. Traffic started to back up. A dually pulling a ramp-trailer full of cars was to my right.
The woman in front of me wasn't happy with the inconvenience, so she whipped her car into the next lane. The dually swerved to miss her.
He couldn't get stopped before hitting the embankment.
The truck stopped instantly. The trailer sheared the kingpin.
Slid through the cab. And sheared the driver in half.
I watched it all. Saw it all.

It didn't bother me a bit at the time.
I find it does now as I type this, though.
After all this time, why?

train hit a car, guy was still alive but we couldn't get him out. Talked to him till Jaws of life arrived

You notice the strangest things (and remember them) when you have someone bleeding our in your arms. I remember how the guy had a wad of cash in his pocket that had blown out around the parking lot, and thought it strange the color that bills turned when loaded with blood.

I also noticed the silver pen that was still clipped to his shirt pocket.
Also, the specific color green that the neon sign overhead was projecting in the pool of blood.

Lots of things.

For all of that noticing, it wasn't until the next morning that I saw that I had blood all up and down my arms, all over my clothes, and all over the inside of my car door.


It happened in the parking lot of a hotel that I was leaving, right around midnight. After going through that, then getting in the car and driving home, it pissed me off to no end that the road was full of people who were completely unaware that someone had just died a horrible and accidental death, that his wife would have to fly back to Washington state alone, that his adult kids would never get to say goodbye. All of that, and here's people driving around like they don't care. It took a while (months) before I could properly deal with all of those emotions.

Me. I was hit in my little Toyota 4WD pick up by a 15 year old who had stolen his mother's 74 Benz. He was racing and ran a complete red. It nailed me right under the driver side door and rolled me over a brand new Lexus 400 ( This is the first Lexus, a car I have never seen before on the street) and continue to roll 3 more times. I was not wearing my seat belt because it was not required back then. I was only 17. Blood all over from cuts to my head and body sitting on the curb after I crawed out of the door. Cop came look at the Lexus then walked over and ask "Are you all right?" I reply, " I think so". He drove off. Someone is watching over me for sure that day. I am very lucky.

BAck in grade school, my sister saw a car that ran a stop sign on the bottom of the hill and hit a kid. She said the kid flew x amount of feet and was basically left on the side of the road next to the curb. I wanted to see the impact. What little kid wouldn't? Now, thinking about it, I am glad I was looking the other way.

It is because you are thinking about it Bill.

A brain is a pretty impressive piece of equipment, it can insulate you from just shutting down in a horrible situation, sort of turns your emotions off or something, so you can function. You see everything, maybe that a van is the same one your ex-wife had, color and interior, or that all the birthday gifts scattered in the highway have the same wrapping paper, along with the horrible stuff. If you notice that little stuff at the time, it distracts you from the horrific stuff you can't forget, but don't remember seeing. Self defense mechanism I think.

I used to do big-truck fatal accident investigations. We always investigated as a team and it was my turn to "crawl" which is doing the under-vehicle inspection (brakes, etc). This particular one was a truck versus a pedestrian. The pedestrian liquified and very much of her wound up under the truck.

I finished my work and dropped my coveralls into a bag. They were quite nasty so I left them outside as I certainly was not going to put them in my washing machine. Well, the top of the bag was open and I forgot about it. A bad smell alerted me to it's presence. I looked into the bag and there were maggots feasting on the fleshy bits entrapped in the coveralls. I burned them.

There was nothing visually that ever really bothered me. I seem to be able to segment that stuff to an area of my brain that processes it like numbers with no emotion at all. But the smell of human flesh ground up by a truck is unforgettable. It smells like warm pork sausage - an item expressly forbidden in our house because of that. It is completely wretched to me.

angela

so I smelled like pork did I :)
got burned pretty bad once..
the pain was ..well we've all had pain..
but like Tobra said..
I remember the event clearly..
not the pain..

Rika

I remember standing over a co-worker who was laying on the ground and who had been badly burned in a refinery fire. I couldn't tell if he was on his back or stomach.
There weren't enough distinguishing marks to tell if it was his face or the back of his head I was looking at.

I didn't feel anything. Completely numb for a long time.

Agreed. It's not bothering me today as I read the thread. It just bothered me last night because I was typing (and remembering) the details.

I was an EMT-P from '85-'91 on Camp Pendleton, CA and saw more accidents than I care to remember. Most of the really horrific ones involved a Marine, alcohol and a motorcycle. Really bad combination...