On Thursday, December 1, trauma week traumatized me. It all started out normal with our speaker, Elizabeth Boone, and her assistant, Rachael, and we monitored the patient two days after surgery. The goal was to get them back to walking. First, you should compare the good legs range compared to the bad leg, and this was probably the first time I’ve ever seen math other than addition and subtraction used in real life. She used a protractor to check the range of motion of the legs and feet. They also tested the strength of the legs with exercises like leg raises, where she assisted the bad leg. Then she pulled out this machine that does neuromuscular electrical stimulation, meaning it forces the muscles to engage; this can do a couple of weird things. They put these on us, and it starts off feeling like the muscles they put it on are asleep (I had one on my arm). Then as the power increases, your muscle starts tensing, and eventually, the limb starts moving. Mine made my arm lift, and my fingers and wrist fold in. This device aims to reteach muscles to engage after nerve damage because there can be a disconnect between the brain and the muscle after a severe injury. Even so, this doesn’t work if the nerves were completely destroyed. Now comes the freaky part; before everybody got a chance to use the electrical stimulation, we learned about another method to engage muscles called dry needling. Mrs. Boone is actually a parent at the school, meaning that she is friends with the parents of my classmate Cammie, and she is terrified of needles. Cammie’s parents gave permission for Mrs. Boone to try dry needling on her; when she first put them in, everything was normal, and Cammie’s leg lifted as it should have. Then she fiddled with the needles, and they started touching her bone. Quickly the needles were picked out without second thought, and then those dastardly words fell from Camryn’s mouth, “I think I’m gonna pass out.” Her body fell, and her eyes, still open, rolled over to me as Mr. Bently brushed her hair away. I didn’t know what I was looking at, but I figured if I was looking at a dead person, this is probably what they’d look like. Mr. Bently grabbed her head as Mrs. Boone, and Rachael lifted her legs above her head to get blood flowing to their brain. All of this happened so fast that it looked like they did it on instinct. Then suddenly, “Oh,” she was awake a little hazy, but she was perfectly fine. In short unconscious people have scary eyes, and you shouldn’t look into them if you want to stay sane.
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