Internal bleeding on a motorcycle - It won't happen to me...
In September 2022 Mike Hope a member of the Sandstone team participated in an off-road adventure in the Pyrenees with some great Spanish adventure riders and good friend Joan Bial.
Over dinner one evening Joan explained that he was lucky to be alive...
Here is Joan in his own words:
"I fell on the motorcycle and my shoulder and stomach hurt, we called an ambulance, I was fine, but it hurt a little. Once in the ambulance they didn’t do any tests or ask me anything, at the hospital I was waiting in the wating room sweating a lot and hot, in the end they made me go for an x-ray and there I fainted for a moment, immediately everything sped up. They did tests and saw right away that I had internal bleeding. I had lost two litres of blood. Luckily everything went well but the first night they told my family that they weren’t sure what would happen. I survived just!
Joan had hit his abdomen as he travelled over the handlebars, tearing vital blood vessels inside. He was slowly bleeding to death!!
Why are we telling this story?
We place great emphasis on identifying the mechanism of injury, in other words not just the what but the how.
In this case our team would have taken into the account the "impact of a motorcycle accident" and therefore worked on the assumption of internal bleeding until they could prove otherwise.
If Joan’s fellow riders, or indeed the ambulance staff had followed some basic procedures and used this assumption then his injuries would have been identified much earlier
These injuries are more common than many people believe. They do happen to you!
Would you know what to do?
If you are planning your next adventure, give some thought as to what happened to Joan and consider attending one of our tailored FTACC-E courses.
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