Boston Marathon hit by explosions

Thank you sineed, those photos made me sick for exactly that reason. I've had to look at horrible photos when working at conferences on sexual violence in armed conflicts, torture, and other terrible situations, and hear heartwrenching testimony at conferences on suicide in Aboriginal communities. But I was girded for that, and I presume that my work was doing some good, helping the people who had experienced such awful things.

jas wrote:

Sineed wrote:

Sure. A bomb just went off. EMS wouldn't be allowed into the area right away for the sake of their own safety. And the scene, as the picture shows, was chaotic.

The question was referring to what happens to a human body when it has just had both legs blown off, with two now severed arteries gushing. Right off the bat, the body enters life-threatening shock. As the commentary that was removed from my original post stated:

"If you lose both your legs from explosive trauma half your blood is gone in one minute via the femoral arteries, you're dead after two. Bleeding out is worse with blunt force trauma (like shrapnel) because flesh is torn rather than cut, exposing more arterial and vascular tissue. The human body holds 5 to 6 LITERS of blood. If that really happened, you would see blood EVERYWHERE, the guy would be drenched in it. You would also see what’s called arterial spurting from the injury. Most likely he would vomit after turning ghost white from shock, then turning delirious or passing out. As for the “tourniquet”…

It's not even tied off, it's suspended via gravity, which would literally do nothing to an arterial sever. There’s no pressure applied. There’s no knot with a turn stick for leverage. You can clearly see a gap in the nonexistent wrap job on his left inner thigh (left anterior proximal for you experts). His hands have no blood on them. There’s no blood on the ground. The color in his hands and lips shows good circulation."

 

Sineed wrote:

He looked kind of shocky, if you compare to happier photos of him. His complexion looked grey, possibly a symptom of shock, though he's a healthy young man and thus more resistant to shock. And a wheelchair was handy. He had to be removed somehow. They always have ambulances around at the end of marathons, but stretchers could have already been employed for other people.

He's just had both legs blown off, Sineed. And a minimum of half of his body's blood lost. He would be down, and probably not conscious. You say he looks "kind of shocky"? Is this a joke? Surely as a pharmacist you need to have at minimum Emergency First Aid?

Sineed wrote:

what I think is happening is people are using a discredited conspiracy theory as an excuse to pore over gruesome pictures. It's completely prurient and it also strikes me as a violation of his privacy, as he's lying there experiencing what surely was the worst moment of his life.

Yes, that's why I posted it. I like to look at gore, and I want others to look at it too. Could you possibly sink any lower in your commentary? Is this in lieu of an intelligent response?

I suspect this thread will be closed for length if nothing else. I will post this topic again at a later date, after I've received some responses from my EMR friends. I will post it maybe under Body & Soul and with the heading "What is wrong with this picture?" and then we can see how well our medical experts here on Babble -- the ones who know so much about vaccines and chemotherapy, and so little about first aid for life-threatening injuries -- we'll see how well they do.

What an incredibly nasty piece of shite.

A conspiracy? I guess I imagined my friend losing a limb and another acquaintance dying.

Hmm didnt know I could imagine that

Jeff Bauman's recollections:

Quote:

Then an emergency room surgeon named Allen Panter, who had been watching the race from across the street, appeared above me. He slammed tourniquets around the ragged ends where my legs had been blown off, yelling as he worked.

“Get shirts,” he was screaming over his shoulder. “Get jackets. Shoelaces. Anything. People are bleeding out here.”

“Get away from me,” I said.

“Stay calm.”

I had been calm. I had been completely calm. But this guy was freaking me out. “Go help someone else,” I yelled, pushing him away. “Go help my friend.”

He dipped his hand in my blood and drew a red “C” on my forehead. I remember that so clearly. I think it meant “critical.”

Quote:

Interview Highlights: Jeff Bauman

On seeing graphic photos from that day

“I don’t like seeing the pictures and I’ve seen a lot of horrible pictures, not just the one of Carlos and I in the chair… I’ve seen other pictures and you know, those ones scare me and they make me, you know, they just instantly make me want to cry and I shake after I see ‘em. Just the ones of — I don’t know if you’ve seen ‘em, but there’s gore ones of the actual bomb and people just laying there and I can see me laying there, when I’m laying on the ground. And that was really a tough time for me. That was — I thought I was dead. I thought I was going to die there.”

With 9/11 it was about the victims and the victim's families. "How dare you insult the memory of the victims!" Never mind that it was many of the victim's families who demanded an investigation in the first place, and continue to do so.

With events like the Boston bombing, it's going to be about gore-mongering. "How vile of you to pore over these images of people in agony!"

To understand that an event is possibly staged, you need to look at the images. There's no getting around that. You need to also engage some common sense. These images do raise questions, and it's okay to ask these questions.

I was under the impression that most people in the work force have some kind of first aid training. How is it that so many here don't?

I don't see this conversation ever being productive. jas, please don't post about this topic again on babble. This is not the place for it. I hope you understand why. Email me ([email protected]) if you don't.