Expedition Medicine – 48 hours in the woods.
By Gareth
My first aid certificate was up and this is an essential qualification to carry on working with my Explorer Scouts. Another rather uninteresting day to be spent in a Scout hut with a couple of crepe bandages and triangular bandages at the ready. And of course the resus Annie, just in case. A Saturday of tying up fellow Scouters in bandages and making them look like they had just fallen out a tree…I was busy that day. Shame.
What I ended up with was an altogether different experience. Ditch the rules, ditch the crepe bandages, out with the stuffy Scout hut and replace all this with the woods (lets face it, this is where most Scouting takes place), woodpeckers, damsel flies, non-stop chattering birds, glorious sunshine and three very knowledgeable bushcraft and first aid instructors. And just for good measure, throw in some casualties in a ditch, collapsed pioneering projects, falls from trees and a rather harrowing night exercise – a light aircraft crash. I’m sure you are starting to think that this was a rather more interesting first aid course. Ever built a rope stretcher and carried a casualty from a plane crash, suffering from primary shock, to a waiting helicopter? I did. It was hard work, frightening, but successful. The casualty survived to swap stories around the camp fire with a glass of wine a couple of hours later. A lucky escape…?
Day two and dawn was breaking through the woods, more birds a singing and a brew already on the campfire. Feeling a little happier with my newly acquired practical outdoor first aid skills; it was now time to sit round the fire and enjoy the sunlight beaming through the oak and birch branches with the fragrant aroma of the wood smoke wafting through the forest camp. This was lecture time. Groan. Slightly different to other lecture theatres, but a lecture none the less.
Ok, so maybe I was a little presumptuous about how the lecture was going to be, it was interesting. I’m not saying that corporate strategy at uni wasn’t, but at this lecture we were finding out about wild animals, venomous snakes and poisonous frogs. Ever wondered what to do when a hyena decides to tuck into you when you are happily asleep in your hammock? Get along to a Forest Knights first aid weekend and you’ll find out. Aidy, one of the instructors knows exactly what to do. He woke up with a Hyena attached to his foot whilst on a trip to Africa. Frightening, but amazing first hand account of how to deal with this situation.
From Hyenas to hypo and hyperthermia, what signs to look for and the best ways of dealing with people when they are in these situations. Then, as an aside, but nonetheless a very real risk on expeditions, we discussed frostbite. This kills off the skin and flesh as it freezes and we were surprised to find out it happens in the strangest of places. Most of us have heard of the great explorer Ranulph Fiennes getting frost bitten fingers during an expedition and then cutting them off with a hacksaw when he got home, but how many of us have heard of the frost bitten bums caused by a radio show competition?
The radio station was running a competition to win tickets to a concert. I think the tickets were very sought after so the radio station came up with a suitably hard competition; who could sit on a block of dry ice the longest? The competition was stopped after 90 minutes. The end result was a competitor in hospital for three months with extreme frost bite to the buttocks. They were literally frozen off and the pictures were some of most horrific I’ve seen.
The morning came to a close with us demonstrating our CPR skills, 1st and 2nd casualty assessment under the careful eye of Wayne Jones, head bushcarfter at Forest Knights, congratulating us all later on passing our expedition first aid.
The weekend was incredible. I got home raving about my first aid course with comments from my friends about how boring their first aid at work course had been. I pointed them in the direction of Wayne Jones, Forest Knights and the first aid courses in a beautiful woodland setting.
Kit taken:
Vaude Tent
Rab 2 Season Down Sleeping Bag
Multimat Adventure Self Inflating Sleeping Mat
Tatonka Barrel Holdall
Bridgedale Walking Socks
