10 February 2012

Victim vs casualty

"I know it's your second language, but will you please stop calling him "the victim"! He's a casualty!"
We were wedged in a rift in Dog Hole, and our casualty(!) of the day had come into sight. We were basically being an artificial floor of this somewhat too deep rift; the stretcher would part slide over our laps, and part be crowdsurfed over our heads. That way he would comfortable come down a slope, then make a rather sharp turn, and then go up on the other side.

The last time we had tried this exercise (volunteer casualty with fake broken leg in the cave, and us getting this person out in the most comfortable possible way) things had gone haywire: the casualty got seizures in the cave, and the practice turned into a rescue. As you can't put casualties with fits into a stretcher, we had a very useful night, but we hadn't practiced getting someone out of this fairly tricky cave horizontally. And now we had another try. And this time it worked well...

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