I worked from June 12th to June 17th which is the full Festival. I worked within the main medical tent situated within a building called ‘The Launchpad’. I dealt with everything from small grazes to someone that had pulled all of their shoulder ligaments within their shoulder.
Some of my personal highlights:
- I cleaned a graze with gravel in it. Blasting it with saline solution and gleaning it with gauze. I got my hands on a pair of tweezers, but the piece of gravel actually popped out on the last blast.
- I had a 12 year old with autism who had fallen over with the complaint of a little pain on his foot. I brought him into the minors bay and with his autism, found he was reluctant to show his feet, but managed to work my way around this by saying I can close our cool blue curtains so only we could see his feet. This worked surprisingly well and after assessing him, I determined that it might just be a little pull on the bottom of his foot. I needed this confirmed by a clinician for discharge, but he was reluctant to have another person in the room. I managed to big up the clinician and bribe the 12 year old with a bandage… Which I also found to work very well. After the clinician came in, it was confirmed to be a little pull and they were free to be discharged. Though the problem wasn’t necessarily a ‘highlight’, it was a great example of how people are different and require different ways of interaction during examination.
- I had a really, really tall gentleman coming in holding his head so I asked the most ‘in your face’ question you could think of; “Hey buddy, have you knocked your head?” – So when he said, “No, my arm hurts.” I was a little confused. I asked him to put his arms by his side so I could compare his arms… The issue was instantly visible, there’s a big lump on his left shoulder that resembles an egg. This, obviously, is not the way his shoulder is meant to look. So I took him into a majors bay and brought a Doctor in to double check my findings and he was taken back a little… Fair to say we put in an X-Ray request. Before getting him to X-Ray, I grabbed a bottle of Entonox to administer due to the pain he was in after his adrenaline wearing off. After scanning his shoulder we discovered a lovely bone separation. But it wasn’t a break and it wasn’t a dislocation we could just, ‘Pop back in’. What he’d done is actually tear all the tendons in his shoulder which caused his bone to ‘drop’ and would need surgery at his local hospital to get that fixed.
- I learned about EKG/ECG’s and what a 12 lead was, where to place nodes and the mnemonic, “Ride Your Green Bike” for a four lead. What surprised me when doing a 12 lead is that there’s actually 10 leads / nodes, so why is it called a 12 lead? With your first 4 nodes you actually get 6 views of the heart, how cool is that? Then when you apply your other 6, that makes 12 views of your heart!