Once upon a second Iraq deployment I was flying CASEVAC, casualty evacuation. It was a quite the experience. One day we picked up an insurgent from the Shock Trauma Platoon in Ramadi to haul him to a higher level trauma center. He was pretty messed up and had quite a few medical interventions done when we got him. Bandages and tubes coming out of everywhere sort of a thing. This guy was also blindfolded, because he was not a good person.
We threw the normal vital signs tools on him as we took off. It was just two basic tools, a pulse oximeter and an electric blood pressure cuff, between the noise and vibrations of helicopter these two tools were the best we had for quantifiable numbers. As we rose in the air his oxygen saturation dropped.
He had been shot through the chest multiple times and it looked initially like he was developing a tension pneumothorax (collaping lung). I was about to do a needle decompression, which relieves the pressure in chest allowing the lung to properly expand. As I was getting a decompression needle, I had another thought, what if this insurgent thought we were going to throw him out of the helicopter? I would have thought that if I was him. He deserved it after all.
What if he was just freaked out, really freaked out? That should change the vital signs I bet. So I decided to grab his hand and gave it a squeeze. His oxygen saturation started climbing and his vital signs started to even out, remaining stable the rest of the flight with no further interventions other than the constant holding of his hand.
Not all the flights stuck with me, most are starting to run together, but this one did. I remember thinking a few things. One I was intially more interested in playing with a tool (doing the needle decompression) than anything else, not a good place to be. Two, this was just another example of the classically poor performance of our ammunition. Mostly though, it really was a telling fact of how important the mental aspect and human connection is to health.
That turd bucket certainly changed my perspective. By that point of the deployment we had seen a lot of trauma and I was numb to it. The guy who was injured, this was a new experience for him, and that was why we were there after all, so make it about him. I realized everything boiled down was about mindset and the mental aspect. With that the way you interact with people will build them up or tear them down.
Philippians 2:3-4 ESV Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.
So go and be a blessing.
-Joe
Outpost 95 