I actually asked here about the injuries I got in a bad fall while running last weekend. I noted that here in the heart of supposedly hard-nosed Boston a crowd of people rushed to my assistance to see if I was OK. Someone offered to use their cell phone to call paramedics if I thought I needed them. I declined. I sustained a gash over my right eye and a busted lip which were bleeding pretty heavily. A lady found a clean tissue in her purse and offered me that to stop the bleeding. Even the little kids in tow were extremely solicitous. They didn’t know exactly what to do, but they could see form all the scrapes, abrasions and blood that it didn’t feel good and they tried to cheer me up. One person mentioned that at the pool in the park, all the lifeguards are trained in first aid. Being a pool member, I decided to hike over there and see if they thought I needed immediate attention or could wait till Monday for my nearby clinic to open.
As I was walking toward the pool, a woman passing by with her kids outside the park on the street sidewalk saw how battered I looked and asked me what happened. Hearing the story, she came into the park. In her purse, she had wet wipes that she used to help me clean up a huge area of scraped off skin on my right shoulder and abrasion wounds on the knees and palms. She even had one of those pop-to-cool ice packs in her purse, and popped it into action to stop the bleeding of the cut over my eye and the busted lip..
At the Mirabella pool, the lifeguard got a replacement to stand his watch on the pool and took time to cleanse all the wounds with disinfectant, and to dress them temporarily. He said the cut over the eye was long enough for stitches, but the skin was nicely closed and stitches probably wouldn’t be needed. He advised me on symptoms associated with traumatic brain injury and said that if I felt any of that, I should call for a ride to the emergency room immediately. Otherwise, he said, waiting for the clinic to open the next day should be fine.
When the doctor finally looked me over at the clinic I got new, more professionally done dressings for the wounds, and a tetanus booster shot. But the doctor said exactly what the lifeguard had about the gash over the eye and about symptoms of brain trauma. I was amazed and overjoyed at how many people offered to help and at how capable each was of doing at least something to get me back up and operating after the fall.