St. John Ambulance Wilderness 1st Aid Level 1 - Day 2

the next morning dawned wet and cold, coz it rained at about 4am. when it first rained, i heard it first rather than felt it coz i was sleeping in the roofed section of the long house, with the hood of my sleeping bag pulled down low until only my nose was poking out... so that was why i thought we're safe from the rain... until i heard the gal next to me dragging her mattress to the wall-end of the roofed section. on her own! she just left me there! hmm... she must be thinking i'm some weird gal who reads by the light of my headlamp at night and was glad to get away from me! hehe...

it was still drizzling slightly when we woke up at 7am...

to the mess area for some hot coffee... and hopefully can beg a few
pieces of bread from some of the members, coz i didn't bring any food!

view of the long house from the mess... "borrowed" this pic
from one of the members from facebook... good shot, huh?

i found another use for my triangular bandage, when i realized that i forgot to bring a belt
for my loose shorts! hehe... see, i even applied the reef knot i learnt the night before!

after breakfast, it's theory again... i think by now, most of us were
really tired and worn-out, so everyone was just struggling to stay awake!

then we were mercifully woken up from our stupor to do these exercises...
no lar, actually we were practicing the various signals to the helicopter
in cases of evacuation by air. i think we're gonna fail if we were tested on this! :P

in the 2nd half of the morning, we had another mock rescue. this time really into the jungle, and more real! this is another "borrowed" photo... coz all the team members were quite serious in this mock exercise, unlike the night before!

our 'victim' slipped and fell, and had a compound fracture on her right knee. we had to make a make-shift stretcher from scratch to bring the casualty out from the hutan. in situations like this, we need to just patch them up and evacuate them as soon as possible... never try to wash or treat the wounds!

the first team to bring the casualty out! but we had
the worst stretcher! hehehe... well, good lesson learnt!

the wound looked so real! not sure if can see from this pic, but
they even made it look like the bone is jutting out from her knee!

gorry sight, right? in real-life situations, we're not supposed to flinch or go "yucks" or "OMG!" at such sights, because it will cause more distress to the victim. this is another use for the ring bandage, or "donut"...

this team found a creative way to inform the hospital on their
findings... by scribbling on the leg of the victim with the marker pen!

debriefing... demonstrating on the do's and don'ts...

the coordinator demonstrating how to fashion a make-shift stretcher from scratch... but actually, this was what my team did and it got criticized by the very same coordinator! just that my team's was a bit on the short side... hmm...

after lunch, we were shown the 3 rescue methods with abseiling...
method 1: a person stuck halfway up or down

we walk towards them slowly, and just before we're within the victim's reach, we
should stop and explain to them what we are going to do and what we want them to do.
this is to prevent the victim from grabbing us in a fit of panic and bring us both tumbling down like humpty-dumpty!

method 2: a person injured and can't possibly
abseil down him/herself... so we use piggy back lar...

method 3: carrying a casualty down on the spine board

as it was getting pretty late, we didn't get the chance to abseil down... had to go down the way we came up... i think this section of the course took too long a time. the coordinator was a bit slow in figuring out how to tie the various knots, and then trying to explain a lot of things to us in a short period of time... i think if i'm faced with a situation like this, i won't be able to do it!

lastly, we were taught the heimlich maneuver. when we see a person choking, we must first ask permission to help! then go stand behind the person, spread his/her legs a bit and stand in the forward stance with one leg in between the victim's legs. this is so that in case the victim collapses, we will have a firm stance to catch their fall and not fall together with them. next we push the victim's hands up and out of the way, coz if not, it'll be a bit 'chor-teng' (canto: "take up space" or "in the way") for us to perform the maneuver...

with one hand, find the victim's navel and put 2 fingers above it. then with the other hand, make a fist with the thumb tucked in (means the other 4 fingers covering the thumb lar) and place it above the 2 fingers just now. and then just push in in an upward motion, HARD! keep pushing, until:
1. the foreign object falls out
or
2. the victim collapse. then proceed with cpr!

our turn to try it, but not really pushing in hard lar... just to get a feel of how
it's done. N, i hold u partially responsible for putting me in this situation! >:(

our final lesson is the recovery position. 1. put one of the victim's hands up in a "hello" position

2. bend the victim's knee (the leg opposite to the raised hand) and cross it over the other knee

3. bring the victim's other hand over to the cheek, palm out

4. slowly roll the victim over onto his/her side, with his/her hand pillowing his/her cheek

5. slowly adjust the head in the 'head tilt chin lift' position to clear the airways and ease breathing

6. pat the victim gently and sing a lullaby... ok, not really!
this is also the recovery position for fits victims, after the seizure has stopped

and we're done! one group photo before we go!

on the way back, we saw a bad accident on the karak highway. we actually saw the bus swaying and swerving in front of us thru a bad jam! at first we thought the bus just failed to break in time due to the speed it was traveling in, but later we learnt that the bus's breaks had actually given way!

minutes after we saw it swaying and swerving in the emergency lane, we came to the accident scene. the bus had finally managed to stop after crashing into a lorry, an avanza and another bus. the avanza was turned turtle and it seemed pretty bad, but my carpool and i did not stop to help, even tho' we've just gone thru 1st aid training! :P coz there were a lot of other cars stopping at the shoulder already, and we did not want to contribute further to the jam! anyway, the newspapers reported the next day that thankfully no lives were lost...