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The most likely person to be first at the scene of a motorcycle crash
is another motorcyclist.
You really want to think about getting properly trained.
Hi, I'm Vicki Sanfelipo. I'm the Executive Director of
Accident Scene Management and the author of A Crash Course for the Motorcyclist.
We've done a number of presentations at the Allstate Rider Protection Zone
over the past two years, and during that time,
we've been able to affect many people in just a few moments,
where they stop and they say "Oh, that's right, there might be
something special or different about motorcycle trauma."
It was back in 1996 then that I started putting things together
so that I could start teaching my friends.
I kind of got worried about me, thinking, "Who's going to take care of me
if I'm the one who goes down?"
So 1996, it was put together; 1997, I started teaching people,
and in that year, in five sessions, I taught 375 people what to do.
We were starting to get stories from people saying they had used the information.
One of them was really dramatic. It was a guy who took the class
because his friends dragged him along to it.
He had no idea that that next summer, he was going to end up
using the information he learned to save his wife's life.
She hit a piece of pavement that had buckled from the heat of the day.
When she hit the ground after being thrown from her motorcycle,
when he got to her, she was motionless. She wasn't breathing.
So he went into action and lifted her jaw, started -- gave her a couple of breaths.
She started breathing again. Without that simple class that he had taken
for one day, he would've never known what to do.
So he credits the class with saving his wife's life.
First thing you want to do is prevent further injury.
You want to move uninvolved vehicles completely off the road.
You then assess your situation. The reason we put that before
contacting EMS isn't that we want you to delay a phone call.
Not at all. We want you to get that phone call going as fast as possible.
We want you to take 60 seconds or less to assess your situation,
make sure that person is safe, and then you'd be able to go get some help.
When we get to treatment, we concentrate first on airway,
making sure there's a passageway for air to get from here to here.
Then we look at circulation. Circulation in trauma is bleeding.
So you want to concentrate on controlling bleeding, then shock,
and then spinal immobilization. They're trying to decide
whether or not she's breathing, and what they're noticing is that
it's going to be hard to really treat her with her still underneath that bike,
so they checked to make sure that she wasn't trapped,
and now they're sliding her out from underneath that bike.
They've done an assessment, looking, listening, and feeling
for breathing, and they've decided that she's not breathing.
And this helmet's going to have to come off so that they can
initiate rescue breathing on her.
He's got one hand on her jaw, being careful not to lean into her neck,
and he's got another hand that's going to be catching her head.
He's going to lift her jaw to lift her tongue off of the back of her throat,
and once he did that, you could see now that she's able to breathe.
The reason she wasn't breathing is her tongue was blocking her airway.
Now that she is breathing, we can address what's going on with her leg.
Grabbing his trauma shears, and he's going to take a look
to see what's going on over there.
What he found is that there was exposed bone.
She has a tib fib fracture, and he took some sterile gauze,
and he's covering those exposed bones. You can't put direct pressure
over the top of where a broken bone is, so he's going to take his hand,
put it right in her groin, and he's going to press on her femoral artery.
Shock is when you're bleeding internally and you're losing blood,
so she may be suffering from shock. For that reason,
we're going to take Michelle, who's standing around here,
and we're going to have her take her leg and lift it up and just put it on her lap.
And that takes blood from the legs and it brings it back to the core of her body.
So that's shock. And then we've got our spinal immobilization.
It's the ABCs of trauma.
With that much, you can make a huge difference.