As you know, I am a member of the county's CERT program. Our section of the county meets once a month. This month's meeting was a Step one drill where we set up a mock disaster. About half the group were victims and the other half were responders. This was an excellent learning technique for all involved.
On Saturday, I went to a MED OPS (Medical Operations) 1 class. This mainly taught us how to triage disaster sites and victims. We are to look for 3 main killers-airway, bleeding and shock. We then broke the group into half and each made up our own injuries and had to quickly triage each victim by tagging them red(immediate), yellow (delayed), green (walking wounded) or black & white (dead). This was an excellent class that really helped me feel more confident and get some practice responding to an emergency.
Then on Tuesday night, we had the drill at our meeting. The "victims" arrived early to get their moulage (makeup) put on. It is absolutely AMAZING how real they can make these injuries look with makeup alone. I will be showing some of the pictures here, but I must warn you that they are pretty gross looking. However, keep in mind-it is JUST MAKEUP!! So, if you don't want to see the pictures, you may want to stop right here. Otherwise, here are some of the pictures:
I chose to be a walking wounded in that I should have been able to respond to the CERT Members when they yelled "If you can hear my voice, come to me". However, I pretended to be stuck under this large object that fell on me. My breathing was fine (especially since I was moaning and yelling the whole time!). My injury was really minor and I should have been tagged yellow. I had bruising, swelling, and lacerations to my right arm. The first group tagged me red because they didn't pull my arm out to see how bad my injuries were and the second group correctly tagged me yellow. Each group had eight minutes to triage the whole room of people, so it was overwhelming to the responders, just as it would be in a real situation. This is a picture of my arm:
This is an amputated finger. We actually were screaming and looking for her finger during the exercise.
This is a compound fracture in which the bone is exposed:
This is a pencil stuck in his foot. Yuck!!
Here they are applying the makeup for the foot above:
A group shot doing makeup:
This lady was "dead". That is why she is blue-no circulation.
This lady had something sticking out of her forehead and was confused:
This guy had rebar stuck in his chest cavity with blood coming out of his mouth:
This guy had third degree burns on his hands:
This guy had a screw stuck in his neck:
There were a bunch of other injuries that I didn't get pictures of, but this gives you an idea. I think the moulage team did an excellent job making our injuries look real to give the responders a realistic exercise.
The exciting news at this meeting was that our county got our 1000th member last week with the last graduating class. And it is a friend of mine!! I am so excited to have a friend in CERT!!! The amputated finger above actually belonged to my friend, Michelle Parks. I had a good time hanging out with her (and looking for her missing finger!). Her husband is going to sign up for the next class so hopefully he will be with us soon, as well. I invite anyone else who is interested to sign up for a class.
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