This year's mass casualty drill was a gas explosion at a football game concession stand. USA students, paramedics, fire rescue, and St. Luke's biomedical program students participated in this interactive event. The Hancock Whitney Stadium was used as the main site of the drill. We portrayed bombing victims and got to play the full part of the role.
It took two hours to prepare for the drill. Many of us used temporary tattoos as a base for our burns and fake wax, which we later coated in fake blood. The false wounds covered most of our bodies and took a while to perfect. Some of us even went as far as burning our clothes to make it all seem realistic. I was supposed to be a victim of a basal skull fracture, so I had bruising around my eyes and cerebral spinal fluid coming out of my ear. We couldn't use real CSF because that would be hard to get, so we used ultrasound gelly and put it on my ear, neck, and hair. When I tell you it was cold, it was cold! My neck felt kind of numb from the gelly being cold and it did freeze because of the cold weather. When we finished with the bruising around the eyes, I looked like a raccoon, which is why most medical specialists coin the trauma response "raccoon eyes". I also added a fake nosebleed to give the whole head trauma some flair. Then, we ate lunch and got on the bus, which was covered in trash bags so it didn't get dirty.
When we got there, we were split up and assigned to different areas based on our injuries and traumas to make those injuries seem more logical. I lay on the concrete role of unconsciousness and unresponsiveness. Not before long, the false explosion went off. It did actually sound like a real explosion, as we were told to cover our ears, and the scene was even more chaotic than imaginable. There were yelps for help, screams of pain, crying children, and a hilarious elderly woman with diabetes who hurt her leg(Catelynn) and made me break character from dying of laughter. A paramedic came up to me and gave me a red card, which meant I would later go to that part of the makeshift hospital they made. Twenty minutes in, some paramedics came up to me and said that they wanted to carry me, but I didn't want to be carried. They said that they would come back with a backboard. I was left there for another 45 minutes! The victim I was acting as probably would have died already because of all the CSF and head trauma. Not to mention, I was lying on freezing cold concrete on a chilly day with frozen ultrasound gelly coming out of my hair and ear. I was there for so long that my legs fell asleep and by the time I finally got to the red zone, I was one of the last people left. While I was there, a paramedic proceeded to poke me incredibly hard in the shoulder and asked me, "Are you dead yet?" I woke up from my supposed unconsciousness to reply with, "I guess not?" and tell her to not poke me so hard. The person I was portraying was supposed to be on the verge of dying, so I practically rose up from the dead to tell her I was not dead. My response got her to leave me alone. I lay there in the sun for twenty minutes and all of the previously frozen ultrasound gelly melted into my neck and tangled into my hair. I got picked up and put in an ambulance and rode over to the ambulance. The ambulance ride was fun! Presley and I were in there and I got to lie on the stretcher, which was way more comfortable than concrete. I was taken to the red tent at the makeshift hospital where I was finally taken off the backboard after about an hour being strapped to it and put on a bed. A lot of my fellow classmates were in the tent too and after we were told the drill was done, we had conversations with the nurses and took photos of each other's injuries.
Overall, I believe this was a fun experience, other than the chilly weather and ultrasound gelly discomfort. To my surprise, my character survived. If the process had proceeded, I would have gotten an MRI scan and had the CSF drained. I liked this mass casualty drill because I learned about how chaotic mass casualties are and how there are lots of people involved in getting all the victims taken care of. I don't have any negative things to say about it other than getting violently poked in the shoulder. I think that the paramedics' identification of injuries went well(other than with Armahni), but their response to head injuries should have been a little faster because head, neck, and back injuries are the most important to take care of and could be fatal. The paramedics also shouldn't be violently poking people whose badges and acting skills clearly show that they are supposed to be unconscious and unresponsive. Despite these inconveniences, this drill benefited the medical providers with training and practice so they can be prepared if a situation like this happens in real life and not make these mistakes. I would love to participate in a drill like this next year and experience that rush of adrenaline in interactive emergency preparedness procedure.
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