Chainsaw Accident

 

I treated a patient who had fallen while he was using a chainsaw to cut a branch off a tall tree. When we arrive we found him with a half severed right leg, and a major arterial bleed from his femoral artery, which he was vainly struggling desperately to contol with both his hands. His wife was there, but she was trying her best to keep her young children away from the excitement. As we started to treat the badly injured man… we noticed that he started laughing… almost hysterically… at first, we continued working without asking him anything about it – often people react in very strange ways to terrible accidents such as these, and sometimes it’s just a response to the low blood preasure and decreased cerebral perfusion (blood to the brain). We applied an arterial tornequet and raised his leg… it didn’t completely stop the bleeding, but it slowed it down. Severed arteries are virtually impossible to control. We applied a second tourniquet to stem the bleeding. This seemed to do the job… the patient was still laughing, but he was conscious and the bleeding had stopped… so we figured we weren’t doing too bad a job. We still knew we didn’t have time to muck around on seen and basically this was one of those ‘load and go’ situations. The man was still laughing, and throughout all the excitement, I hadn’t really given any thought to what in the world he could be laughing at. We rapidly got him loaded in the back of the ambulance and inserted 2 large bore cannulas (one 16gauge and one 14 gauge) enroute to hospital. It was only at this point that I finally thought I had enough time to ask the obvious question…

“You just nearly killed yourself… what could possibly be so funny?”

The man looks at me… starts laughing hysterically and says… “Its just that… I just can’t  stop….”

I let him keep laughing a little while longer… eventually he settled down…. and told me…

“I had been meaning to trim a few branches off that tree for months now… I had my children there and my wife… and I had told them all to stand back while I used the chainsaw… now, when I fell… and I immediately saw how much of my leg I had taken off… and I realised I was probably going to die… I should have been thinking about my wife and kids, about my own life, about what its going to be like if I don’t make it through this… but you know the only thing that came through my head was?”

I look at them as though he’s a little mad… and shake my head…

“All I could think of was that stupid movie by Monty Python and the “Black Knight” and all I could see in my own mind was me standing there, like the “Black Knight” and yelling “Its only a flesh wound!”