T takes charge

T had her first blood-and-stitches injury to deal with today as a student athletic trainer.  A junior-varsity player got hit and laid open his forearm somehow (the circumstances still aren’t completely clear) down into the muscle.  When the coaches brought him in to the dressing room he was crying, borderline hysteric, and all of a gore blood down his arm.  The staff trainer was away at another game, so T was All the Trainer There Was.

Now she ain’t just real fond of blood, but she didn’t let that stop her—she commandeered another player to bring her gauze swabs, alcohol, and whatever else she needed and while two coaches talked with the boy, trying to get him calmed down a bit and to put together the story of what happened, she blotted the wound clear and got it stable enough that he could be transported to get stitches.  Along the way she ordered one coach out of the dressing room (the guy is known to have a very poor stomach for blood), and T told him flatly, “I don’t have time to clean up your vomit and take care of him too!”  (Later she went and apologized for yelling at him; the coach brushed it off, saying that he was on his way out anyway as soon as he realized the situation.)  She also tore a strip of hide off another player who had hit the hurt one and caused the injury; this self-centered jerk came in and started harassing the guy about ‘you got blood all over my glove and now you gonna buy me another one ’cause you ruined this one.’  She ordered him out of the dressing room, said that it was his hit that had laid this arm open in the first place so if there was any fault it was his own, and that in the second place the kid was hurt badly and didn’t need to have to listen to this kind of guff.

Remarkable, how she sounds so much like me at times.

Mr. Bill abandons the chicken.  Fnord.