Shameless capitalizing on TWILIGHT

My hits are down a little, probably due to the fact that I never update. Therefore, today's entry is brought to you by pop culture vampires and a shameless ploy for search engine hits. (Hell, just to make things interesting, all the desperate ploy bits will be in blood dripping red.)

So. My first aid assignment for the day was to figure out how to treat a neck wound with "severe arterial hemorrhage." Not that wimpy, mild arterial hemorrhage. We're going all the way on this one, dudes. Clearly enough, this is not the kind of thing I could find a volunteer for too easily. Not, that is, unless I was on the set of steamy vampire romance True Blood (which, I'll have you know, I don't watch. But I see the ads on the train all the time). The first step, clearly, was to figure out what exactly arterial hemorrhage was and how it differed from regular old bleeding. The answer? Arterial hemorrhage is way grosser and more cinematic. You can tell the difference because one happens when you get a papercut and the other happens when bright red blood is spurting out at regular, pulse-like intervals.

The biggest challenge with bleeding of any kind is just to get it under control -- an adult can lose 1 pint of blood to little effect, but make that 2 pints (or a delicious snack for Twilight's Edward!), and things start to move towards shock. More than that, and we're getting into the dying part. (Or the undead? Eh, that one was kind of grasping at straws.)

The major neck artery is the carotid, which you know from being smart and I know from trashy television shows. (Like The Vampire Diaries? Or is this getting silly?) Now, while we'd usually fight arterial bleeding with direct pressure, tourniquets on the extremeties, things like that. The problem arises from the fact that we're talking about the neck here. The body part that you get all "gah!"-ish if your scarf is too tight. So pressure is not exactly the ideal situation here. Unless you're a sexy sexy vampire. Instead, we need to get a little more creative.

The first thing you want to do is to avoid touching things as much as possible -- you might dislodge some sort of beginning-of-a-clot, which would make things even worse. Well, that's really the second thing you want to do. The first is to call a hospital, because things are going to get real bad real quick -- things will get so bad that the internet seems to be pretty much telling me that the only solution is to have a really good doctor use a balloon catheter to stop the bleeding and conduct unpleasant surgeries. If your patient lives that long. (Also, tonight, I have seen more bleeding necks on the internet than I even know what to do with. There are so many reasons I am not a doctor.)

Anyway. If you've called a hospital and not mucked around inside the wound too much, you can also -- very very very carefully -- apply pressure below the wound to the carotid artery. You know where it is. Find your pulse in your neck. Yeah. Right there. Find a spot below the spurting blood and press. Don't press on both sides of the neck at the same time and try not to compress the windpipe, but give it a shot.

Hey, look at you. You saved someone's life.

And you thought you just got here to see the entire cast of Twilight naked. Psh.