A mechanic?

Where we were.

It was around 05:00 and we were thinking what to eat, because we had a couple of early calls and we couldnt eat before that, so there we were really hungry and deciding where to go. Paramedics are known for their excellent knowledge of all the street stands and "fast food" restaurants in the city, but sometimes being a bless and sometimes a curse we couldn´t decide where to go in our universe of more than 100 posibilities.

So that´s right, we didn´t take our chance and the radio start hauling. We will be spending another call with our stomachs empty, the ambulance driver, picked up the ardio and reply to the call of the central.
"Proceed with caution, lights and sirens, to street Hidalgo number 00"
"What are they reporting central?"
"Its a female crushed by a car"

In that moment i started to ask myself; Crushed? why she didnt said ran over... or hit or struck by a car.....

A moment later the siren and the movement took me back to the ambulance. We were going trough the special lane only used for public transport buses, this is the best way of getting by some roads in extreme traffic conditions, and we were going fast. The look in the other cars drivers was of envy, we could use the public transport lane and they were stuck there in the city´s traffic.

15 minutes later, we were on the scene. Yes i know 15 minutes its a lot of time, but we were far far away and were the only ambulance aviable.

The EMT and driver get down from the ambulance, so as the other EMT and me.
We saw a female lying on the ground covered in grease and oil, and my first tought was, she is a mechanic and the jack went down or something like that, so i got close, and then something told me i was wrong, mechanics dont use high hills neither jeans and tank tops...

We start our assessment and in some point she told us how this had happened.
"I give it a couple of tries but the car didn´t started, its a very old car, so i figure out why not give the starter a couple of hits. i have done it before and it worked, it sometimes gets stucked, so i got in the front of the car, then crawled below it and then i give the starter a good strike. But i forgot something. I left it on the first gear....."

The car started and dragged this poor woman 2 and a half meters before stalling, bending her at the point that her ankles were in front of her eyes. She started screaming and the neighbors realized that something was awfully wrong, so some of them got there in a second and saw that she was trapped down there in a terrible position, so in a brave and quick move, a bunch of guys lifted the front of the car with their own hands and one of them took her out.

We placed her a cervical collar, gave her O2, got her in a stretcher (spineboard), and went to the hospital. In the way to the hospital she complained about a lot of pain in her pelvis, we couldn´t find any signs of internal bleeding so we were only partially worried. She could develop a mayor loss of blood over minutes so we constantly assesed her.

In the end she had the pelvis fractured in several places, but no internal bleeding.

She ended up realizing the terrible mistake she commited,
and where no one else could hear us we got to express what crossed our minds when we got down of the ambulance, that was:

-I tought she was a mechanic...-



"And remember, in the most difficult situations people do unbelievable things...."