By Duane Wolfe
Parkers Prairie (Minn.) Police Department
They started to tell stories about other, even bloodier accidents and I wondered if I had what it took, because out there in the dark I was uncertain, unsure, and scared. Scared I would do something wrong, scared I would be asked to do something I couldn’t, and just plain scared.
When the waitress arrived and took our orders I told her I wanted a hamburger, paused and added, “rare” just to let them know that I wasn’t bothered by the accident. They all smiled and laughed and I felt like I had taken my first steps towards being strong, tough, and fearless. I ate the hamburger quickly even though I wasn’t hungry just to show them that I wasn’t bothered by what I had seen and what I had done.
But that night, I didn’t sleep. I kept playing the call over and over in my head. It bothered me. It bothered me that I wasn’t tough like them and that this call kept me awake. It bothered me that I didn’t feel as confident as the officers on the scene appeared to be. It bothered me that the feel of someone else’s blood drying on me bothered me. It hadn’t seemed to bother the other officers. The fact that it bothered me bothered me. But their words came back, “You’ll get used to it, kid.”
Fast forward a few years. I pinned on a badge, uniform, and gun. The guys I worked with all seemed strong, tough, and fearless. Some of them were even younger than me. I hadn’t been on long when one night I got a call of a motorcycle/car accident. It was out in the county but I was closest so I shot out there – red lights and siren.
It had been shift change at the local factory as a thousand people got off work and headed home. Someone got impatient and decided that the 200 cars on the highway in front of them were driving too slow and decided to pass. Apparently they didn’t notice the motorcycle coming their way.
Yamaha versus Cadillac is never an even fight.
The driver of the Cadillac was OK. I placed her in my squad car and went looking for the driver of the motorcycle. He was lying in the ditch. I grabbed the first aid kit and went to him. HIV was still only in the big cities not in rural northern Minnesota. Meaning, I was ungloved.
It was another one of those nights when you can see your breath. He had a pulse and I could see the steam rising as he breathed slowly. I flashed back to the night of the first accident, only this time I was all alone. I started to do an assessment, checking for obvious injuries, his head and neck where ok, each arm ok, chest and spine ok, pelvis ok, left leg, smack. When I got below the knee my hands came together in a mess of bloody and blue jeans. Up to this point I had been fairly strong, tough and fearless, after all I had been a cop for seven months.
My mind started to race. I had received First Aid training. I had the first aid kit. Despite my best efforts I couldn’t find anything in there for a severed limb. I had a C-collar for an injured neck. I had air splints for broken bones. I had a mask for CPR. Where was the severed limb kit?
Someone in the crowd yelled, “Oh, my God his leg is cut off! He needs a tourniquet!” Yeah, he needs a tourniquet. I went up to the car and looked for something to make a tourniquet out of. The tire iron and my inner duty belt would do the job. I advised dispatch of the situation and requested that they please tell the ambulance to get here NOW!.
As I readied the tourniquet I remembered that I had to write down the time it was applied. I looked at my watch and it was 0037. I remember the time to this day. I readied the tourniquet. I heard a voice behind me quietly say, “He doesn’t need a tourniquet”. I turned and a deputy was standing over my shoulder like a guardian angel. I never heard his siren or his approach. I said, “You’re an EMT. You take him”. I was only a First Responder and he was more experienced. He had been on for a whole year.
The ambulance arrived and took over. They told us to try and find the missing appendage in case it could be reattached. The deputy and I went looking. We looked at the impact site and the distance and direction the motorcyclist had been thrown and tried to figure the flight trajectory of a severed leg.
We searched one side of the road with our flashlights and found his boot and then, on the off chance that the impact had sent the limb in the opposite direction, the other side of the road. A group of men asked us what we were looking for and we told them. They said they would help look. The ambulance crew advised us they were close to leaving and that the limb had to be found.
Due to the heavy traffic there were plenty of bystanders who could make a search line. We had just started to gather the crowd together to direct them in the search when we heard a loud, high pitched voice under obvious stress yell,” Officer, Officer!” We turned and looked and our volunteers standing in a small circle, faces an ashen gray, pointing at the ground.
We ran over and there lay the limb still wearing a white sweat sock with three red stripes. My first thought was-“Man those Hollywood horror movies do a good job it looks exactly the same” and the next was, “Whose gonna pick it up?” Apparently the thought crossed the deputy’s mind at the same time. We looked at each other. Thinking quickly (for once) I said, “We’re in the county, it’s yours”. Undeniable jurisdiction having been determined he picked it up by the socked ankle and we jogged across the field together to the waiting ambulance in full view of the bystanders. I heard later that some people in the crowd had vomited at the sight.
As we continued with the accident investigation I had to stop several times and scrape off something that was stuck to the bottom of my boots. One looked a lot like part of a knee cap.