Evan Dallas wrote: . . . treating a dislocated shoulder . . . lays on his/her stomach . . . 5-10 pound weight tied to the wrist and the arm hanging straight down . . . "foolproof". No, it is not foolproof, but it is as good as you are going to get. We tried this once on the Kipawa. Dave had a very long and nasty swim in some IV on Buttonhook, which among other things, dislocated his shoulder. (He said that he was portaging, so I was surprised to have to fish him.) One of the other paddlers was an emergency room physician, who laid him out on this stomach along an elevated log, and weighted his dangling arm. After over an hour, the shoulder still did not go back in. The physician said that Dave was too tense, and that drugs would be needed to relax him before the shoulder would go back in. We didnt have any muscle relaxants with us (or any other drugs), so we had to bind up Dave and evacuate him. Thats when thing got interesting. We had get Dave to the other side of the river before we could walk him out. He was in no condition to try to hang on to a boat, and he figured that he could simply sit in his boat while we towed him across. We tried it, but a whirlpool caught him and dumped him. Ill never forget the look on his face looking up from under the surface. To make matters worse, when I laid back and pulled him out, I grabbed the rope with which we had bound his shoulder and arm, so we went round the whirlpool a few times with him in quite a bit of pain before I was able to get a proper grip on him. Another boat then pulled my boat across while I held on to Dave and tried to keep his face out of the water. He took in a lot of water, but kept pretty calm. Richard Culpeper http://my.tbaytel.net/culpeper/ *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Fri Jun 10 2005 - 15:34:25 PDT
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