Wilderness First Responder Course - Woofer

Justin and Kyle assessing crazy-eyed Nate

Oh hey.  Shout out to Luke Safranski and Melissa Booth for having their little son Landon and another shout out to Jenna and Cade Wakefield for shooting out Caleb Dan the next day!  Way to go all you life-givers :)

I have been slacking on the blogging so this is a saved post from way back when so I hope to keep more up to date on the blogging.

I was fortunate enough to take a Wilderness First Responder course with all of the 2011 Field Team Leaders back in late February.  I try to think back to what my initial thoughts were about the course but I'm sure I underestimated the knowledge intake and the importance of the skills that I would be taking in during this 9-day course.

The crew after making hypothermia wraps

We had two instructors, John and Maizie, came in from Austin, TX and Central WA to teach this course.  John was 6'4" and Maizie was 4'10".  This course had an added element and that was inches upon inches of falling snow every time we had to go outside for 9 days straight.

Attempting to sum up everything I learned in a blog entry is as difficult as it must have been to cram this much curriculum into a 9-day course.  What I mean is that we were briefed in anything from diabetes treatment to splinting and holding traction on a mid-leg femur fracture.  They put it as, "We have just enough knowledge to be dangerous."  The great aspect of this certification is that the wilderness is now a safer place because 16 more people are trained to help if anything bad were to happen to some one out in the backcountry.

I was lucky enough to get backboarded

Each morning we had breakfast at 7am and by 8am we were at our seats learning topics like spine injuries, chest wounds, trauma, leg and arm fractures, internal bleeding, etc.  We would break up these sit down sessions with scenarios.  These scenarios are 15-20 minutes of patients (other students) being outside acting out an injury that they endured in the wild.  Inside our partner and ourself (sometimes alone) would gather up a insulate mat, first aid bag, blanket and tarp and head outside to treat an injury.

Each injury would vary.  Sometimes the patient would be unresponsive with their airway clogged with candy in which case we had to open the airway to clear out the debris.  Others were bruised ribs with a chance of internal bleeding and to go along with that would have a spine injury where we had to stabilize the spine while we went through a Patient Assessment.

There was a day we did a MCI (Mass Casualty Incident) where 4 people had major and life-threatening injuries and they were spread out throughout the forest in which case we had to load them onto backboard and litters to carry them out of the wild.  At the time they were very traumatizing experiences but now I believe I would be more calm and clear-minded if a situation like this were to occur in real life.  These scenarios were very realistic because every patient was to act as real as possible.

Stabilized spine.  Bunny ears?  Come on...

One night I was helping out with a tibula/fibula fracture and an hour into the splinting my instructors told me to have a seizure so the other two students with me had to act accordingly.  My seizure has apparently gone down in history as the most ridiculous seizure ever performed because I remained standing for 30 seconds before going to the ground.  My rescuers were laughing at me while I had a seizure and I giggled a little too.

All in all I passed the course on our final written exam and practical.  I still have a lot to learn as far as wilderness rescue but I have enough skills to possibly save a life and that helps ease my mind when being outdoors.