Joe Btfsplk
Well-known member
Read this story from a former EMT I saw on Quora, As an EMT, what is a moment that made your jaw drop? - Quora - https://www.quora.com/As-an-EMT-what-is-a-moment-that-made-your-jaw-drop
As an EMT, what is a moment that made your jaw drop?
Charles Sendicker
Charles Sendicker, Firefighter / Engineer; HazMat Specialist
Answered Thu
[former Paramedic; former Police Officer / Criminal Investigator]
WARNING: Graphic, potentially disturbing content. If you are under 18 years of age, offended or disturbed by sexually-explicit and/or graphically-violent descriptions, or just plain squeamish… STOP READING HERE.
I experienced the most bizarre call of my EMS career while moonlighting with a private ambulance company in the mid-1970s.
The call came in as “domestic assault, police on-scene, clear to enter”.
This was the days before 9–1–1. Requests for ambulance service, whether from a citizen, or a police or fire agency, were made by calling the ambulance company’s published telephone number. The company dispatcher doled out calls to available ambulances by radio. We had absolutely no way to directly communicate with police or fire responders, or to even monitor their radio traffic. As such, we rarely knew the details surrounding the incident we were about to walk into.
It was about 2 AM on a Saturday night in a mid-sized city in the northeastern part of the United States. My partner and I arrived at the provided address, a two-story, low-end apartment complex, and collected our gear. You never knew what you were going to find at these kinds of “domestic assaults”, so we always went in prepared for just about anything.
We climbed the stairs, and moved down the second-story walkway to the involved apartment. There was a police officer standing outside who motioned us to enter. Once inside, we saw two additional police officers standing, and a young woman sitting in an upholstered chair, in the living room. The woman (mid-20s; wearing only a long white T-shirt ) was literally covered with blood. The entire front of the T-shirt was red… soaked with blood. Her arms, hands, neck, and thighs were smeared with blood. Her shoulder-length hair was matted with blood. And her face was a bloody mess: Significant lacerations above both eyes (her eyes were swollen shut), on her cheeks, and around her mouth. Both ears were cauliflowered and bloody.
Assuming that this was our assault victim, my partner and I set our boxes down next to her and were about to start our initial assessment when one of the police officers, pointing towards the bedroom, said, “no, in there”. So we picked up our stuff and moved to the bedroom door.
There were two more police officers in the bedroom, and a late-20-something young man lying on the bed. The man on the bed was making sounds that were a cross between moans, sobs, and wails. Both officers had blood all over the fronts of their uniforms, on their arms and hands, and on their faces (this was the days before HIV… no one wore gloves or had any concern about getting blood on themselves). A large crimson circle of blood was present on the sheets and mattress of the bed, centered more or less around the man’s buttocks. There was two or three bloody, folded towels on the man’s crotch, and one of the police officers was leaning over the man, pressing down on the towels.
When my partner lifted the towels, we saw what was probably every male’s worst nightmare: The shaft of the man’s penis was shredded, and only a few filaments of skin and flesh were holding the head of the organ (glans) to what remained of the shaft. Given the amount of blood we were seeing, it was clear this patient was at risk of bleeding-out. So I applied hemostats (clamps) on the ends of the severed blood vessels (2 major arteries; 1 major vein) to stop the worst of the blood loss. Then we packed the remaining tissue with trauma dressings, wrapped a pressure bandage around his crotch, and gave our patient a very fast ride to the hospital (the woman was delivered to the hospital by police car).
This was the 1970s: The art and science of micro-surgery and reattachment of amputated body parts was in its infancy. Plus, this was no clean-cut Lorena Bobbitt amputation (look it up)… there just wasn’t a whole lot of viable tissue left for reattachment, so I didn’t hold out a lot of hope for this patient’s “manhood”.
The next shift, the hospital Emergency Room director filled us in on our previous night’s patients. The woman, in addition to multiple head and facial contusions and lacerations, had two fractured eye sockets, a fractured cheek, a dislocated and broken jaw, and numerous knocked-out teeth. The man did not fare well either. A team of surgeons tried to reattach the head of his penis to the little bit of tissue that was left at the base, but they weren’t very optimistic about its long-term viability.
We later found out what had happened from some of the police officers who were on-scene that night. Apparently the young man had met the young woman at a bar, and after a few (too many) drinks, brought her back to his apartment. The party moved to the bedroom, and escalated to her giving the man a “blow job”. But unfortunately for him, the woman suffered from epilepsy and had a grand mal seizure (today called a “generalized seizure”) while his penis was in her mouth. With this type of seizure, the body stiffens and then violently convulses. In this particular case, the woman’s jaw (i.e., teeth) clenched down on the penis, and then began to rhythmically spasm… essentially “chewing” on the captive flesh in her mouth. The result was kind of like dropping a chunk of meat into a food processor that was set to “slice and dice”.
The man of course responded instantly: He used his two fists and beat the woman all about the head in a desperate attempt to rescue his entrapped and beleaguered penis from her mouth…that’s where her injuries came from.
So, the moral of the story:
Gentlemen, it’s probably wise to get a medical history before entrusting your precious manhood to a stranger’s mouth.
As an EMT, what is a moment that made your jaw drop?
Charles Sendicker
Charles Sendicker, Firefighter / Engineer; HazMat Specialist
Answered Thu
[former Paramedic; former Police Officer / Criminal Investigator]
WARNING: Graphic, potentially disturbing content. If you are under 18 years of age, offended or disturbed by sexually-explicit and/or graphically-violent descriptions, or just plain squeamish… STOP READING HERE.
I experienced the most bizarre call of my EMS career while moonlighting with a private ambulance company in the mid-1970s.
The call came in as “domestic assault, police on-scene, clear to enter”.
This was the days before 9–1–1. Requests for ambulance service, whether from a citizen, or a police or fire agency, were made by calling the ambulance company’s published telephone number. The company dispatcher doled out calls to available ambulances by radio. We had absolutely no way to directly communicate with police or fire responders, or to even monitor their radio traffic. As such, we rarely knew the details surrounding the incident we were about to walk into.
It was about 2 AM on a Saturday night in a mid-sized city in the northeastern part of the United States. My partner and I arrived at the provided address, a two-story, low-end apartment complex, and collected our gear. You never knew what you were going to find at these kinds of “domestic assaults”, so we always went in prepared for just about anything.
We climbed the stairs, and moved down the second-story walkway to the involved apartment. There was a police officer standing outside who motioned us to enter. Once inside, we saw two additional police officers standing, and a young woman sitting in an upholstered chair, in the living room. The woman (mid-20s; wearing only a long white T-shirt ) was literally covered with blood. The entire front of the T-shirt was red… soaked with blood. Her arms, hands, neck, and thighs were smeared with blood. Her shoulder-length hair was matted with blood. And her face was a bloody mess: Significant lacerations above both eyes (her eyes were swollen shut), on her cheeks, and around her mouth. Both ears were cauliflowered and bloody.
Assuming that this was our assault victim, my partner and I set our boxes down next to her and were about to start our initial assessment when one of the police officers, pointing towards the bedroom, said, “no, in there”. So we picked up our stuff and moved to the bedroom door.
There were two more police officers in the bedroom, and a late-20-something young man lying on the bed. The man on the bed was making sounds that were a cross between moans, sobs, and wails. Both officers had blood all over the fronts of their uniforms, on their arms and hands, and on their faces (this was the days before HIV… no one wore gloves or had any concern about getting blood on themselves). A large crimson circle of blood was present on the sheets and mattress of the bed, centered more or less around the man’s buttocks. There was two or three bloody, folded towels on the man’s crotch, and one of the police officers was leaning over the man, pressing down on the towels.
When my partner lifted the towels, we saw what was probably every male’s worst nightmare: The shaft of the man’s penis was shredded, and only a few filaments of skin and flesh were holding the head of the organ (glans) to what remained of the shaft. Given the amount of blood we were seeing, it was clear this patient was at risk of bleeding-out. So I applied hemostats (clamps) on the ends of the severed blood vessels (2 major arteries; 1 major vein) to stop the worst of the blood loss. Then we packed the remaining tissue with trauma dressings, wrapped a pressure bandage around his crotch, and gave our patient a very fast ride to the hospital (the woman was delivered to the hospital by police car).
This was the 1970s: The art and science of micro-surgery and reattachment of amputated body parts was in its infancy. Plus, this was no clean-cut Lorena Bobbitt amputation (look it up)… there just wasn’t a whole lot of viable tissue left for reattachment, so I didn’t hold out a lot of hope for this patient’s “manhood”.
The next shift, the hospital Emergency Room director filled us in on our previous night’s patients. The woman, in addition to multiple head and facial contusions and lacerations, had two fractured eye sockets, a fractured cheek, a dislocated and broken jaw, and numerous knocked-out teeth. The man did not fare well either. A team of surgeons tried to reattach the head of his penis to the little bit of tissue that was left at the base, but they weren’t very optimistic about its long-term viability.
We later found out what had happened from some of the police officers who were on-scene that night. Apparently the young man had met the young woman at a bar, and after a few (too many) drinks, brought her back to his apartment. The party moved to the bedroom, and escalated to her giving the man a “blow job”. But unfortunately for him, the woman suffered from epilepsy and had a grand mal seizure (today called a “generalized seizure”) while his penis was in her mouth. With this type of seizure, the body stiffens and then violently convulses. In this particular case, the woman’s jaw (i.e., teeth) clenched down on the penis, and then began to rhythmically spasm… essentially “chewing” on the captive flesh in her mouth. The result was kind of like dropping a chunk of meat into a food processor that was set to “slice and dice”.
The man of course responded instantly: He used his two fists and beat the woman all about the head in a desperate attempt to rescue his entrapped and beleaguered penis from her mouth…that’s where her injuries came from.
So, the moral of the story:
Gentlemen, it’s probably wise to get a medical history before entrusting your precious manhood to a stranger’s mouth.
