Recognizing Deficiencies and the Benefits of Preparation
“Hey Uncle Chris! I think Jimmy hurt his wrist!”
We were on vacation at the beach; my family, my sister’s family and my parents all packed into a rental house a short walk from the Atlantic. It was the first time my three youngest had seen the ocean, and I was applying sunscreen on the back patio when the injury was announced.
I glanced over at James (a toddler) and chuckled to myself; I’d only seen this about a hundred times. He was holding his arm by the wrist against his body, flexed a bit at the elbow.
“It’s not his wrist. It’s a ‘Nursemaid’s elbow’. What happened?” I asked, as I checked his arm.
“I had him by the hand and was taking him to get his swim-trunks on when he did the wet-noodle thing and dropped to the floor because he didn’t want to leave the living room,” said my brother-in-law. “Now he won’t use that arm”.
A little pressure here, a little turn there, a ‘POP’, and voila’! A successful reduction of a radial head dislocation. As I watched Jimmy toddle off happily over the cactus-spiked sand dunes towards the beach, I thought to myself ‘I really should have a proper medical kit with me. I don’t have any supplies if something more serious happens’.
……
Later that day, after pulling the cactus burrs out of my feet and enjoying the 60-degree surf with the kids (my oldest son, 8-year-old Eli, stayed in the longest), I decided to rinse the salt off in the shower before dinner. Walking into the bathroom, I noticed the fancy sliding-glass shower door had slid out of the bottom track. ‘I’d better fix this before one of the kids comes in here and breaks it,’ I said to myself. ‘Don’t want one of them to get hurt’. Grabbing the rail on the door, I lifted it up to pop it back into the track… and it exploded in my hands.
Standing there in a puddle of shattered glass, holding the now-detached door handle, bleeding from several limbs (don’t worry, I still had my swim-trunks on, so the important stuff was safe), a few things went through my mind:
1) $h*!
2) Well, at least it wasn’t one of the kids that did this.
3) Yeah, I really need to start carrying a proper medical kit with me.
I had hardened the family van against an EMP strike, had the tools to fight my way back to the mainland in case of societal collapse on the island, extra food and extra water in the basement, but didn’t have a single band-aid to take care of a booboo.
…..
Fast forward almost 3 months, and we’re down at grandpop’s farm for the week. No cell reception out there. The kids were taking a dip in the cement pond and I’d just started my work-out for the day. I was literally in the middle of the first set of the first exercise of the first round when:
“Waaaaahhhh!”
“Oh no, Isaiah! I’m sorry! Oh no, daddy, there’s blood! Oh, I’m sorry, Isaiah!”
Eli was having a grand time seeing how many times he could make his “pool gem” (large plastic faux-pirate-treasure-gem) skip across the surface of the water. Turns out, it will skip about six times until it is stopped abruptly by Isaiah’s face.
As I walked over and scooped a dripping-wet and bleeding Isaiah out of the pool, a few things went through my mind:
1) $h*!
2) Yeah, that’s gonna’ need a stitch or two.
3) Well, at least this time I decided to bring a proper medical kit with me.
I wrapped Isaiah up in a towel, took him up to the living room and laid him down with a pillow and a blanket. Needle driver? Check. Sutures? Check. 4x4’s? Check. Anesthetic? Ice from the freezer. Scrub tech? Grandpop, once I woke him up from his nap. My whole med kit, minus Grandpop, was right there in the living room, sitting next to my fight-off-the-communist-apocalypse tools. A couple quick sutures, a dab of bacitracin ointment, a piece of chocolate cake (thanks Grandmom!) and voila’! Isaiah’s right eyebrow is back in one piece and he’s back in the pool loving life. The whole ordeal took about 10 minutes.
…..
So, what’s the point of the above two short stories? What lessons did I learn, and what principles can be applied?
1) Recognize your deficiencies and correct them.
· Clearly, traveling far from home without even the most basic of medical supplies, especially with a family full of young, energetic kids, especially as the official/unofficial trip doctor, is a deficiency. It’s wasn’t enough to simply recognize that though; I had to correct the problem by putting together a travel medical kit.
2) Knowledge vs. skills vs. materials
· As a physician, I have the knowledge and skills needed to take care of (most of) the medical issues that I encountered on these two trips. At the beach, I didn’t have the materials I needed. What do you need to correct your deficiencies: knowledge, skills, materials, or a combination of all three?
3) Preparation for the extreme can help the routine.
· Maybe you’re not convinced you need to prepare for the communist apocalypse, or maybe your loved ones aren’t on board. Emergency preparation, if done thoughtfully, has more practical application than you might expect. I didn’t have to defend Grandpop’s farm from the barbarian hordes or set up an emergency surgical tent in the cow pasture, but I saved my son a lot of trauma and time by having what I needed on hand to care for him comfortably at home, rather than drag him out to town to an ED or urgent care center.
4) It’s a lifestyle.
· Making the conscious decision to be more “prepared” is a lifestyle change. It doesn’t have to be dramatic, such as selling all your earthly possessions to live in a walled compound off the grid. It can be small but deliberate, such as putting some band-aids in your travel toiletry kit, and keeping your gas tank at least half full during the drive to your vacation destination.
Think. Learn. Prepare. Train. Grow. Because you never know when your older brother is going to hit you in the face with a plastic pool gem…
—Doctor “Chris”