Wade Cherry <wadethefred@gmail.com>

Andy's Accident: Report and PowerPoint
1 message
Miehl Andy-FAM040 <Andrew.Miehl@motorola.com> Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 12:00 PM
To: wadethefred@gmail.com, jenayolivia@gmail.com, dmchmiel@gmail.com
All,
 
As you are all aware, "on Thursday, August 14th, I became a victim in an industrial-style accident where I sustained compound fractures of both femurs." I am now well on my way to recovery, but I would simply like to thank all of you for your thoughts, prayers, and support through this time. Thank you very, very much.
 
In some circles, there are conflicting accounts of what happened. Let me set things straight with a written record of the accident (below) and a PowerPoint presentation (attached).
 
Again, thank you all very much for your support. With your continued thoughts and prayers, I should be walking with a cane in October, and perhaps jogging again by December! THANK YOU!
 
-Andy
I was helping my aunt with some construction on her house in Northwestern Pennsylvania, ~30 miles south of Erie. My brother and I took a break to throw the Frisbee while she went to retrieve a load of insulation from the local home improvement store. When she returned, I positioned myself on the deck of her house's porch, BEHIND her Ford Escape to 1.) direct her as she reversed to this docking point and 2.) to be there to immediately unload the insulation once she stopped.
 
Unfortunately, she didn't stop. Distracted with the many changes that have taken place with the family lately, she simply confused the accelerator for the break and FLOORED the accelerator. In a flash the Escape pounced up onto the porch deck and smashed into the wall at the back of the porch--with me in between.
 
For those Mechanical Engineers in the audience, it can be said that my femurs were instantly subjected to a radically destructive 3-point-bend test. The Escape's bumper applied the load at the bones' center span, and the house wall supported both the hip and knee ends. The bumper drove through to the point where it fractured the bones. It continued further to misalign the fractured ends (compound fracture), and continued even further on the left side to push the one of the fractured ends THROUGH the skin on the back side of my thigh (open fracture). Muscles were obviously crushed as well--later at the hospital they would refer to the entire injury as a "crush" injury...not just broken legs. But the knees, pelvis, arteries, and nerves were entirely spared. It could have been much, much worse had any of these thing been damaged also.
 
I screamed immediately, she pulled forward off the porch, and I collapsed into a heap on the deck. With twisted, smashed legs, I curled into the fetal position on the deck. They felt like useless masses strung from my pelvis. There was a splash of blood on my shorts; there was lots and LOTS of pain. 911 and a tourniquet were instantly invoked, but the tourniquet was soon dashed after the 911 folks instructed to simply apply direct pressure. I never once lost consciousness, although I wish I had. At one point it felt like my entire quadriceps had spasm'd/cramped/contracted/bunched up into my groin. It was really, really bad, but I was really, really grateful to have my brother, sister-in-law, and aunt there with me in the clutch.
 
The ambulance arrived in 10-15 minutes, however a medic was not among the crew, so they could not administer any medicine for pain. With adamant instruction from me--"DO NOT TOUCH MY LEGS"--they were able to sort of roll me onto a stretcher board. Eventually I would have to be stretched out and strapped down in order to be transported to the hospital, but not yet...NOT without something for the pain.
 
It was at this point that I notice one of the volunteer paramedics was quite young. Wide-eyed and green this kid was--he was certainly of high school age. I could just tell that this was his first experience on an ambulance crew. And what a way to inaugurate a potential career as an EMT: bi-lateral compound femur fractures, one of them open, with victim fully conscious.
 
I would later learn this was indeed a bran-new ambulance service, initiated that very day (August 14th), and I was their first emergency call. This was actually a fortunate thing, for if this service wasn't available, I would have had an even longer wait for advanced medical support. Also, to be fair, the entire crew was not inexperienced, for there were several older guys there helping out. It turns out that their captain was actually the rookie's father.
 
They told me to brace for some pain as they hefted me into the ambulance. They weren't able to secure my legs at all, so I yelled my pain utterances as they loaded me in. And of course, when I was about half way there, the rookie contacted my right knee. I responded with heap of curses toward him, for which I almost immediately apologized. Some day that kid will become the best paramedic ever.
 
They were able to give me pure oxygen in the ambulance, however my injuries caused me to breathe franticly, too deeply and quickly for the apparatus, so I'm not sure that it did much good. An IV was administered with a saline drip. They started to cut off my clothing: my black t-shirt, my double-seated Dickies shorts, my sneakers. I recall seeing parts of my shorts being passed around, and I *believe* I remember the back thigh part being nearly soaked in blood. On the up side, they only needed to snip the laces to remove my shoes, so the kicks were spared.
 
Finally the medic showed up with the drugs. She administered a seemingly hefty dose of morphine, and their first order after it took effect was to straighten my legs. Left leg first, the worse of the two. Even with the morphine, it was still excruciating when they started, but once the legs approached straight with a little traction applied, things sort of cracked and popped in place and then everything felt much better--the way it feels when you "crack" your knuckles, ankles, or back. They applied splints to hold the traction and I was more-or-less ready for transit...by air.
 
The medevac helicopter landed in the field directly across the road. This was our softball field when we were growing up, and it was the same field where my brother and I were tossing the Frisbee no more than 1 hr before. The side of this field that faced my aunt's house (where all the action had taken place up to this point) was boarded by a relatively deep drainage ditch. As a final solution to them many less-robust bridging solutions that had deteriorated over the years, a formidable earthen bridge had been constructed to span this gap. Quite conveniently, the ambulance needed to simple move straight forward over this bridge to hand me off to the helicopter.
 
As they were transfering me to the helicopter, I asked if they were going to strap me to the outside like in M.A.S.H. They said no, but they did load me in through the  rear end of the aircraft, which, in retrospect, is kinda funny. It was a tight fit (as would be expected), my nose just inches away from the helicopter's tail section.
 
Once neatly packed in there, the two flight medics hopped in and we were off. They gave me some more pain medicine in route. Just minutes later, the pilot executed a landing that was like sublimation backwards--seamless--I was surprised that were on the ground.
 
This is getting a bit long, so I'll try to end it quickly with just a few bullets of significant events that happened at the hospital:
  1. I asked for the stretcher [on which they brought me into the ER] to be removed prior to my family coming in to see me--the bottom half was smeared with blood.
  2. They operated on me almost immediately. It was a 4 hour procedure in which they completely took apart my knees to gain access to the knee-end of the femur. This is where they inserted solid titanium rods through the length of the fractured bones in order to re-align them. I now have titanium where a large portion of my body's red-blood-cell-generating marrow should be. As I write this, the area of the fracture bothers me very little compared to my knees. My "re-built" knees, NOT the fractured femurs, are hands-down the biggest contributor to my present discomfort and immobility, and the largest impetus for rehabilitation.
  3. I slept on-and-off the first night--a half hour here, 15 minutes there. They gave me a "pain pump"--basically self-regulated intravenous doses of morphine. After a while, the opiate was doing nothing for my pain and serving only to make me feel really weird, constipated, and nauseous (those that have seen Trainspotting, recall the scene where Ewin McGreggor's character's begins his post-rock-bottom attempt at detox.).
  4. After the surgery, my resting heart rate was about 100 BPM. This was primarily due to all the blood loss from the injury, however the problem was compounded by my body's weakened ability to generate blood due to the loss of marrow from the surgery. There were too few red blood cells to carry oxygen to the rest of my body, so amazingly it compensated by shuttling more quickly what little red blood cells that were available. Eventually, the red count was so low that they had to transfuse me. I took two bags of hemoglobin on August 16th.

Accident.ppt
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