Rambling & More Rambling

I am a combat medic in the US Army, I aspire to one day be a doctor of Internal Medicine or Neuropsychology. I love to ramble about medicine and computers. I would like to consider myself very knowledgable on emergency trauma care and will gladly answer any questions. I will be mostly posting things related to my interests and my job.

[doctorlugubrious]

Here is a video of me demonstrating my preferred tourniquet technique. There are several correct ways of applying a CAT (Combat Application Tourniquet) with various advantages and disadvantages. This particular one was taught to me by one of my NCOs who is the oldest and considered to be the wisest of our medics. This method ultimately stuck with me because of its simplicity and effectiveness with the downside of it not being one of the more fast techniques although with practice it can become extremely fast. 

This particular video was taken during the CLS class I was helping teach

[doctorlugubrious]

Here’s another video of me practicing in AIT; an Emergency Chricothyroidotomy or “Cric”. Since then I have learned a much more efficient method of insertion that makes use of the ‘Bougie’ that is included in all of our Cric kits. 

For those that are not aware of this procedure here’s the thick of it. Under the circumstance that a casualties airway becomes significantly compromised to a point that intubation or other airway adjuncts will not work to maintain their airway (such as maxillofacial trauma, inhalation burns, etc) then your mouth and throat are of no use to me or you, until we can get you to the next echelon of care. You however of course will not make it to the next level of care if you cannot breath. So what I essentially do is cut a hole creating you a new airway into your trachea so that air will enter from this lower point and not have to go through your significantly blocked upper airway. 

[doctorlugubrious]

Here’s a video of me back in AIT practicing my Inguinal wound packing. In training the packing itself is generally pretty easy with the hardest part being the wrapping which usually comes with the issues of your wrap dislodging or loosening your gauze or even just simply remembering the technique. It’s fascinating that there are several different techniques for the same thing, especially with combat first aid. From what I have been taught the difficulty actually switches in real world application, having to both find and occlude the artery and tightly pack in the combat gauze at the same time. 

During this time it was pretty stressful so this practicing was actually done on my off time. Performance anxiety is very real when seemingly small mistakes could end up failing you during the actual testing. Only recently have I really come to understand why that is.