Day 9

i passed!!! I am now a certified Wilderness First Responder!

Day 8

well well well. day 8. only one more day. today we did some lecturing in the morning and a few PAS drills. then in the after noon we had a hour review playing wfr family feud. next we went out and had our third and final simulation. it was over relatively fast. we were only on scene for 45 min before every patient was out. after we were all packed up we went back to PING and debriefed. now its almost all done! just the test tomorrow written and practical then its graduation time. assuming that i pass!!! wish me luck! g'night.

Day 7

hmmm. well. today was uneventful. we had a quiz in the morning and then we did a PAS drill not sure what it was about. had some lectures. another PAS drill and then lecture and lunch. after lunch more lecture and another PAS drill. this one was fun we went outside. 2 friends on one side of a river responders couldn't get to the patient who had gone unconscious due to either a lightening strike or near drowning. the responders had to tell the consious friend how to do revive the unconsious friend. it was fun to hear them explain how to do CPR. more lecturing the rest of the time. and thats about it. pretty much a lecture day.

Day 6 Day off!!!!

so today was our day off. it felt so good to sleep in a little bit. when i woke up i just layed there and relaxed!!! then i got up and made myself some pancakes!!! i ate 5 in about an hour. :] so good!!! after that we watched some CSI. at noon Aaron and i went to Nelsonville to see Steve. i got all set up and registered for winter quarter! next Aaron had to do something at school so we went over there and ran into Ben Bohl. so i talked to him about getting my keys for the appartment. he told us to meet him back at the office so we went back there and he gave us a bag full of keys that i had to go try and find which ones worked. ha. i ended up finding the storage key and front door key that i had marked when i was clearing out Amandas and my stuff. those were the only keys that actually worked on anything in the appartment. we took the keys back and headed back to Athens. we took the scenic route up 691 then out on 56 came out right at Brita's appartment. now i have watched a movie and finished this blog. so it is studying time!! yeah!!!

Day 5

so day 5!!
feeling much better today, i had a small cup of lucky charms. not the best thing but the closest thing to cheerios. we had a lecture on anaphlaxis or something like that. after which we practiced using a needle to inject a patient with epinephrine. we injected a clementine with a saline serum just to practice. it was fun. then we started a lecture on thermal problems. we focused on hypothermia. after the lecture we went out to the common room and started going over how to wrap a patient who is in a severe hypothermic state. i volunteered to be the patient. so Gary, the other instructor, wrapped me up in a very warm package. i was in there for about 45 min. it was kinda comfortable. it was getting a little warm towards the end but other then that it wasn't to bad being tied in a bundle. i felt like a well wrapped present!! haha. then they put me on a make shift litter and tied me to it. fun fun fun! we went back into the room for some more lecture time. then broke for a few hours for lunch. now i am writing this!! tonight at 5 we are going back and starting our second simulation. this time i get to be a patient. it is going to be cold and fun with lots of screaming and yelling!!! ill write some more after the sim. oh yeah and its going to be a night simulation so head lights are a must!!!

so night simulation. lots of fun. everyone met up at PING at 5 some instruction was given and the primary's and secondary's started getting gear ready. the patients (me and others) went out with Daz and Gary and they gave us the rest of our patient profiles. so over all there were 5 of us in the upper group and 5 in the lower group. i was in the upper. we were pretending to be a group of friends who were camping illegally out on campus property. for some reason we were all idiots. no one brought cooked food or any water. so. one person was in the tent with a gas lamp on, needless to say that's not good. another person was trying to light the stove to cook the raw hot dogs and the stove blew up in his face. the next person had a dislocated shoulder and anaphlaxis he was gathering fire wood when he heard the explosion and ran down the hill to find out what happened in the process he dislocated his shoulder. now hours before this Jack and i went to find some water for everyone. jack fell in the water and came down with severe hypothermia and i slipped and fell. hitting my head and impaleing my leg on a root. so. hours later the rescuers are called and help comes for all of us. so. Jason was my primary rescuer and Maria was the secondary. when they got there i was awake and really concerened about Jack i hadn't heard him for a while and i was worried something was wrong. i had high ASR (acute stress reaction) once they got me calmed down they checked my vitals and started to think about how to get my leg of this 1 in thick stump. they didn't want to just pull my leg off it in case there was more to it then what they saw. so im still yelling and Jason accidently bumps my leg so i scream in pain. haha next they are still thinking of how to get me out. Jason pulls out a small knife that has a toothed blade flicks it open and says we could cut it off. at that point i freak out screaming and yelling at him. see i thought he ment cut off my leg. haha a person in the wildernss would totally have thought the same thing right and we are suppose to make this as real as possible. so im screaming at him that he is sooo not taking my leg off. he was stunned at what he had just done. he couldn't even think of what to say. he got back on track tho and reassured me that they weren't thinking of cutting my leg just the stump. that was the funniest part of it all. so they decided to just pull my leg off it. they layed me down and said on the count of three we are going to pull. one and then he pulled my leg off. i screamed as loud as possible. Gary was video taping someone else and you could hear me screaming in the back ground. ha!! yelling at them for pulling it off on 2 instead of three. wow. that was fun. Gary came a cleared us so we could go help with other patients. we went to help out with Jack. we packaged him up and carried him out of the forest. after that we went back to PING and debriefed by watching the movie and talking about it. that was a fun night.

since we didn't have class the next day we went out to find some food. we walked all up Court street and by the time we were getting places food was closed so we went to bw3 and ate there. that was that!!

Day 4

this morning was horrible. i ate a breakfast of cracklin oat bran and headed to class. at about 0830 i started feeling a little sick. i just brushed it off. then it got worse. over the next hour and a half i was in and out of the bathroom. it was terrible i got sick which helped only a little. i came back the last time after falling asleep in the bathroom and we were going over how to splint a leg for extraction. i had missed a lot already and i felt ok if i just sat and didn't move to much. so i played dummy and let them wrap my leg up when we were practicing. oh and before that we took a quiz which i had to leave in the middle of then come back and finish then leave agian. grrr. we went over more notes after seeing how well we made the splints. i ended up sitting on the floor cause that is the only way my stomach would stop hurting. we didn't get to lunch until 1215hrs and since our driver was going to be a patient for later in the day we had to wait until 1230hrs to leave. we returned a little late and jumped right into how to fix a dislocated shoulder. we practiced that for a little bit then went in for more notes. at about 3 we started getting ready for our first simulation. i ended up being the primary rescuer. we went out to the woods and started everything up. my team was second so we had to wait a while for the next call to come in. when it did we hiked up and found some patients laying around. the first one that we came to ended up beinig my friend Aaron. a tree had fallen on his back while he was out hiking. so my secondary and i went through all the steps. our teach Daz came around with a video camera to put some pressure on us but it didn't bother me to much. i was confident with what i was doing. although looking back on it i realized that things could have been done better and quicker. but it is learning expierence and i most certainly learned a lot. all in all it was quite fun!! we then drove back to PING and watched the video and debriefed on what all happened. now i am going to do my homework, shower and go to sleep. toodles!

Day 3

sooooo day 3 started with a bowl of Lucky Charms! in class we went over the medical/legal portion of being a WFR. we also started working on the nervous system. learning about the spine and ways to check it. we also went over diabetes. today we spent a good amount of time on PAS drills. which are little simulations. after lunch we worked on patients that were found with a MOI for a spine injury laying on their sides and stomaches. we had to get them laying on their back in postition 1 with out posing a large threat to their spines. this was interesting and hard. we also had to move a patient from a pinned position to postition 1. we simulated a pin of the legs, then a pin of the upper body and also a pin of a skiier rapped around a tree with their legs under a rock. that was a hard one. but all of this has been awesome. i am learning so much. later that day we did a back boarding lesson. but instead of showing us exactly how to do it Daz let us go in 3 groups and we had 20 min to get the patient on the back board in a comfortable position that wasn't going to cause the patient any more problems if they would have to be in that postition for up to 2 hours. i got to be the patient in my group! it was fun. i choose to be victim cause i had recent expierence with backboarding people and no one else did. so i choose to take myself out of the help and see what they came up with. it was interesting. i got to had sturups and i was so fit and wrapped up in a blanket i felt like Han Solo when he was frozen. Daz took a picture of each of us so i did the hands up and mouth open look of Han. haha!! it was fun!. i got to be carried to another place it was awesome. but i would not want to be a true patient. no spine problems for me thanks. that was about it for that. we went back in for some more lecture. then we had another drill at the end. it was a good day. tomorrow we have a quiz and our first outdoor in the wilderness simulation. its gonna be wet, muddy, and AWESOME!! goodnight!