Hey hey! Check it out!!!

I got a buck today, the first day of the season. Now I can go study for school and not be quite as distracted, although I do still have a doe tag. I'll probably still go hunting a little bit, but, because I got this buck, I won't be as intent on getting a doe. I will have meat to put in the freezer and antlers to hang on the wall. If I get a doe it will be like an extra bonus.

What I really need to do now is study. At the date that I write this, we have two more weeks of class this fall at Alvernia, and then one more week of finals.

Ok, so here is the scoop on the buck story,

I hunted in the morning before going to school and didn't see deer. After school, I walked out along the edge of the same patch of woods. My neighbor said he had seen a group of deer run into that patch of woods while I was in school, but by the time I got there they had moved on. I walked around elsewhere on the farm for a while but didn't see anything. I was going to head home, but on the way home I decided to call another neighbor and see if I could get permission to hunt on his farm. He didn't answer his, but I happened across his brother heading the other way on the road. We stopped and talked, and he said that he had a bunch of guys that where going to put on a drive through some wooded patches close to my house. I asked if they wanted help and he said they already had too many guys, but that if I wanted to I could go sit off to the side in case something ran out that way when they came through. I thought this was great, and figured it couldn't be better. They where going to make a drive and I could just sit there.

They came through the woods and chased out two deer. The area where we were is an area of some rolling hills with wooded patches in the valleys and fields on the hills. I stood on top of one hill looking down into the bush and across into the next field. Where they were making the drive was in the next valley on the other side of that hill across from me. To get a picture of this in your mind, none of the hills or valleys are all that tall or wide, but are long. I guess you could classify them as small ridges. To look across from one hill to the next is only about 100 yards. Anyway, when I heard them start shooting just over the hill I really perked up and got ready. The two deer, one buck and one doe, came running up over the hill and down into the brush below me. The doe came through the brush and up into my field first, then stopped, facing me head on, and looked straight at me. I shot and missed, and it took off running. I think the noise from that shot might have been enough to stall the buck in his tracks down in the bush. He had just been shot at from all directions on the other side of the hill, and I don't think he knew where my shot had come from. I started moving pretty quick towards the area where I thought he was, and he started coming up through the brush strait towards me. I think he saw me about the same time I saw him. He kind of hunched down and back and tried to turn around and run the other way. When I got what I thought was a clear shot at him I fired and dropped him pretty much on the spot.

The rack is 15 inches wide on the outside, It looks like it would have been a 9-point spread, but most of the points were broken off near their bases. Even the one good tine that remains on the right is chipped off at the tip. This buck must have been a real fighter.

Now here is the part that amazes me: I realized later that I had shot through two small trees and still hit him. Those trees are pictured below and were only about one or two inches thick.

Here are the pictures of those two trees. If you look close enough, they are both visible in both pictures. The difference in these two pictures is the direction they were taken from; the first one is from my point of view when I was shooting, the other is from about where the buck was.

More Vehicle Rescue

Well, this Saturday resulted in another training session and more cars getting chopped up . This time we had the "big toys" out to play. We cut doors and roofs off and lifted dashes with power tools and generally practiced some of the stuff we had learned before.

I couldn't help but to be amused by watching firefighters from separate fire departments argue over whose hydraulic tools where better - something analogous to other people trying to argue with me about Chevy's. It was funny to watch because I didn't really have an opinion, at least not until we put those tools to the test. I really could care less as long as the job gets done, but there was one guy who insisted that his Hurst cutters was better. I was trying to cut through a certain part of the car that was about 3/4 to 1 inch solid steel and his wonderful Hurst couldn't do it, so one of the "diehard" Holmatro guys went and got his precious toy out. It sliced and diced the shaft almost like butter. Of course I had to have an opinion after that. Who wouldn't?

Hurst tools are generally black and gold colored, and Holmatro tools are orange. The Holmatro dude was fussing about how good tools are always painted orange, so I made a remark about how I had always thought that John Deere green was the color to have. He got this big goofy grin and came back with, "Heh heh... [fire]'trucks are red, tractors are green, and rescue tools are orange!"

We did some practice in the morning and they showed us how to do a whole bunch of vehicle rescue techniques. Then, while we where eating lunch, a bunch of guys that were not part of the class set up a scenario for us. They had us respond from Rehrsburg station 27 to their location and give it a try. We had five vehicles with I think at least seven patients. Paint a picture of this in your mind. We had a box truck laying on its passenger's side, a mid-size car also laying on its driver's side with its roof up against the back end of the box truck, and also a pick up truck with its front end pushed into the top of the box truck. There were also two other vehicles, one car and the other a second pickup. The car was upside down with its front end on top of the bed of the small pickup.

These weren't all "normal" patients either. There was one really big dude that had self-extricated and was running around carrying a barrel to simulate a psych patient spreading hazmat everywhere. There was some guy out there in one of the other cars acting like a terrorist. He was screaming in what I think might have been another language, but I couldn't hear him very good from where I was. They say he had a pack of road flares strapped to his chest to simulate explosives, and he was threatening to blow us all up! There was a baby doll that had been ejected from one of the vehicles and was laying on top of the box truck with one of its legs through a hole in the side of the wall. Since I'm an EMT, I was assigned as the interior rescuer to assist with the unresponsive driver of the car that was laying on its side behind the box truck, so from where I was I didn't get to see everything else that was happening. Apparently there were a couple of illegal immigrant stowaways in the back of the box truck. We just kept finding more and more patients. The driver of the overturned box truck was still inside of the cab, but I think he was standing up. The pickup that was rammed against the undercarriage had an entrapped driver and pediatric passenger.

Our unresponsive driver was the last one extricated because he was really way in there and there was no easy way out. We thought about taking him out through the back window by either cutting or spreading it open wider, but then opted for a different plan. We would have had to move the back of the seat out from behind the patient to take him out the rear window. We weren't having much luck with that because with so many vehicles, the tools we wanted were all being used elsewhere at first. Before we could even gain access to the patient, we had to stabilize the car so it wouldn't rock or tip while we got the patient out, and we had to get the back door of the box truck open if we where going to go out through the car roof. First I got the baby doll off of the top of the box truck until they had the car stabilized, and only then they stuffed me in the car with the unresponsive driver to take care of him. While another part of the team was extricating the stowaways through a hole they made in the box's ceiling (remember both the box truck and our car were both on their sides) our part of the team was cutting a hole in the roof of the car. We took the driver out through the roof, through the back of the box truck, and out through the hole in the ceiling that they had already made. From the time we started till our last patient was extricated was approximately 45 minutes.

After everything was done, they pulled us all into a group and had a critique of how it all went. There was definitely a lot of things that could have been done differently and better, but they said that all things considered, 45 minutes for 7+ patients wasn't too bad.

Training like this is fun and gets members from neighboring departments to work together. I think that more of this kind of thing would be good. I would like to see more practice scenarios like this one happen. If departments never practice together, but have to work together at real incidents, it seams like they get all the more critical of each other. I think interdepartmental training is conducive to good teamwork and better community involvement. Training like this happens occasionally in this area, but, in my opinion, not often enough.

Vehicle Rescue

With all that is happening in school, a person would think that it would be logical not to take on any more responsibility, but nooooooo, I had to go stick my neck out and enroll in a vehicle rescue training class through the fire department. I wanted the class pretty badly, especially since I missed my chance at getting into on one that was held about a year ago. VRT classes are hard to find locally and are not usually all that frequent, so when one comes up, it is not a good idea to pass it up.

For every three year certification period, EMT's in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania are required by the PA Department of Health to maintain a certain number of continuing education hours, twelve of which must be in the medical/trauma category. As long as con-ed hours are kept up to date and CPR certifications are current, recertification is processed automatically by the state. That is just to keep your EMT certification though; the other requirements to actually run ambulance or fire calls are the individual's responsibility to keep current. Vehicle Rescue is not a requirement to be an EMT or to run on the ambulance, but it counts as con-ed and is broken up in to three levels: Awareness, Operations, and Technician. All three levels are cross registered with the state fire commissioner as fire training and with the PADOH as con-ed for EMS providers. More info is available at:
www.dsf.health.state.pa.us/health/cwp/view.asp?a=170&q=203353 and
www.osfc.state.pa.us
Copy and paste those URL's to your browser to research them.

This past Saturday was the conclusion of the Operations level of the training. We are taught that disentanglement is removing the vehicle from around the patient, and extrication is then removing the patient from the vehicle. Thanks to the former era of flimsy vehicles built to reduce weight and fuel consumption, some vehicles smash like soda cans. If the patient is still alive after a significant collision, disentanglement and extrication are not always easy and often eat up the "golden hour" of initial emergent patient care. Thankfully the automotive industry is now paying more attention to the safety design of vehicles and many new cars are more stable in crashes. OK, enough of that tangent. Anyway......

Now, I hope I don't disturb you too badly with any graphic mental pictures, but Saturday commenced with much beating, hacking, and prying on junkers to simulate vehicle rescue scenarios with only hand tools. Granted we had a vast array of hand tools, but I learned that you can take the roof off of a car pretty quick with nothing more than a center punch, a windshield saw, and a hacksaw. I learned how to get at a jammed door latch to bust it apart so the door can be open. It is so much easier with hydraulic power tools, cordless power saws, and whatnot but that training is part of the technician level. They wanted us to learn to use hand tools so we appreciate the power tools more, and so that in the event of power tool failure we would not be left clueless. I found out that if you are intent enough, a jammed door can be opened by cutting a hole in the skin of the door and beating vehemently on the latch with a halligan bar and a sledge hammer - rather primitive, but it works. Till we were done with the car it was reduced to a pile of rubble, but we provided just about every conceivable path of extrication for a vehicle that is still on all four wheels.

Some of you who have never seen anything of the sort may have a hard time imagining this, and the very idea of taking this training might seem barbaric and fickle, but remember, accidents happen to even the best of us; you are no exclusion, and no one makes fun of a red-neck when they need one bad enough. We don't cause crashes, and we don't live in an ivory tower, but we do have to know how to get people out of there when they do have an "oops" because they will likely criticize us to no end if we are not proactive (see, my word again) and prepared. There is no sophisticated way to rip a car apart; we just do the bare necessities by focusing on getting the patient out safely and efficiently, not by making a glorious mess and ignoring patient care. I will admit though, it is sort of fun beating around in training on cars that at one time where brand new , but the "fun" disappears pretty quick when it is for real and there is a critically injured patient pinned in there, especially if you know that person. I wouldn't trade the chance to help for much of anything.

This basic vehicle rescue training program is one of many that I hope to add to my "portfolio" of training experiences within the next several years. I hope that through training, higher education, and first handed experience that I will eventually become a highly competent professional in pre-hospital and emergency work. Time will tell.

For more information on vehicle rescue, visit www.rescuetechs.com

My new word

Being a college student requires that you learn and use all kinds of words that you probably didn't use much or at all before. Some words, especially adjectives, you might not have needed before, and others you might not fully understand but you use or have used them anyway. Some examples might be: autonomous, active vs. passive, objective vs. subjective, and so on. To some people these might seem very elementary, but to a dumb Berks County Dutchman they totally blow one's mind because they so efficiently describe something previously unfathomed.

Did you ever come across a new word that you really like? One that you start to use a lot after you learn what it means? I learned a new word, and though I have heard it many times before I could not have cared less what it meant. "Proactive". That's my new word. Proactive is definitely not a word for lazy people. It is sort of like preventive maintenance. I like it because, according to the definitions given, it sounds like a good thing to try to be. If you can be proactive you can save yourself a lot of trouble in the long run.

Proactive: a. Acting in advance to deal with an expected difficulty (American Heritage Dictionary) b. relating to, caused by, or being interference between previous learning and the recall or performance of later learning (Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary) c. serving to prepare for, intervene in, or control an expected occurrence or situation, esp. a negative or difficult one (Dictionary.com)

Do you have words like that? I mean real words that are in the dictionary, not just some word you or someone else made up, like reconnoiter, or yuwstacould. Real words that just sort of stick with you all of a sudden for no apparent reason are what I'm looking for?



Citations:

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. 02 Nov. 2006.

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.0.1). Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006. 02 Nov. 2006.

Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary. Retrieved November 02, 2006, from Dictionary.com website.