Last night about 11pm my neighbor four doors down was taken away in an ambulance. Meanwhile the neighbor's wife was crying in the back of a squad car while polices and forensics went over their place with a fine-toothed comb. The last cop cars left around 3am. The cops wouldn't tell anyone what was going on, which really makes perfect sense if they think they are dealing with a crime scene. None of us knew what was going on and being a tight-knit neighborhood everyone was very worried. There had been some home invasions in a nearby neighborhood lately and people were afraid the bad guys had moved on to us.

About 5pm this afternoon the wife called me and told me what happened. She had been upstairs in their bedroom while her husband was working out in the garage. She fell asleep, but then woke up when the news ended. Her husband wasn't there which was odd because he always comes up and watches the weather report with her (side note, they've been married over 25 years). She went down to the garage and found him unconcious in a pool of blood.

He had been working with some glass which had shattered and sliced through an artery in his arm. He passed out from shock and blood loss before he could alert anyone.

The wife yelled out to their son to call 911 while she tried to stop the bleeding (she's a dental hygenist). The son calls 911 for an ambulance and tells them his dad is bleeding profusely.

The ambulance teams calls the cops and everyone shows up in a carnival of light and sirens. The cops secure the scene, hustle the wife off to the back seat of a car and immediately begin treating the situation like a case of spousal abuse. While the paramedics try to stabilize the husband the police go through the house looking for signs of domestic abuse and grill the wife. They take pictures of everything, dust for fingerprints, grill the son, etc... The wife told me it was just like an episode of CSI.

The ambulance ends up taking the husband to Ben Tuab Hospital in downtown Houston. It is the premire acute trauma hospital in Houston, where they take all the shooting victims and people tore apart in car crashes. The police figured out after several hours that it really was just an accident and his family was allowed to join him.

The husband lost a tremendous amount of blood and according to the paramedics if the wife had waited a few more minutes to check on him he would have died.

So, what can we learn from this?
1. It's good to be married.
2. If you are going to be working alone it's probably good if you have a way of signalling for help if you need it, maybe something like an airhorn.
3. The Houston police are finaly getting their act together. It was discovered recently that a number of homicides in Houston were labelled accidents (house burns down with person tied to a chair!). It looks like now they are trying to do things right.
4. Blast really likes the clickety sound his keyboard makes.

-Blast

Glad that he made it



“The Houston police are finaly getting their act together. It was discovered recently that a number of homicides in Houston were labelled accidents (house burns down with person tied to a chair!).”

WOW!!!! Sounds like my local Sheriffs department

Having been recently the victim of window glass...If I had been unconcious I would have bled to death. Luckily I was able to talk DW through it; her idea of first aid is to throw high octane drinking fuel on the wound and wrap it in a bandanna.

Reading the tag, I first thought you said "an extra _home_ in the garage might be a good idea"

+1!

Good news.

Bad news is that print powder is REALLY hard to get off of everything...

Thanks for the post Blast.

I used it as an opportunity to talk to DD and DW about if something traumatic happens expect the LEO's to put the whole scene on lock down and for them to cooperate with them completely even if it was a case of me being clutsy.

Go along with the LEO's making sure everyone's safe and trust that everything will be sorted out in time.

"He had been working with some glass which had shattered and sliced through an artery in his arm. He passed out from shock and blood loss before he could alert anyone."

Even with a severed artery (esp in the arm), he should have been able to clamp down on it and at least get to the bottom of the stairs and yell for help.

You don't need gauze sponges, pads gloves or anything else. USE YOUR HAND AND APPLY PRESSURE!

What do you want to bet that he gashed himself and fainted from the emotional shock of it, not being prepared/not knowing what to do? And even if he had a panic alarm within reach, would he have hit it? Or would he hit the floor first?

I'm sorry it happened, and he's gonna feel lousy for the next few weeks.

Sue

It's also good to have a nurse for a neighbor. One Father's day about 10 years ago I was cutting some plywood on a table saw. It was a hot day and I was tired and not thinking smart. Short story I ended up getting my left hand tangled in a table saw. Let's just say it hurt like the dickens. After the first shock passed (think I may have passed out for a second) I was able to reach over and turn off the saw. I then was able to retrieve the rest of thumb from the mechanism.

I was in the basement and both my daughters were home but neither heard my screaming (teenagers and loud music). I wrapped my right hand around my left wrist to try to stop the blood loss. I knew I had to get someone's attention but I started worrying about going up the stairs to the first floor because I didn't want to drip blood all over the floors... really. So I managed to get out the basement door to the outside and started to really yell for help. My neighbor, the nurse, heard me and came running from half a block away.

The rest is not a blur, I remember every excruciating moment. I remember the police chief asking my neighbor if she needed gloves as she was keeping pressure on my wrist and she saying no (we'd been friends for 25 years and knew my 'lifestyle' was not a risk to her).

Honestly don't know if I was just lucky or reacted with just enough smarts to not turn a really painful event into a final one. Probably both.

That was not a good summer. The guy my wife hired to finish the job I had been working on set my house on fire.

(Great story on the house fire. My DW was at work when a neighbor called the school offce to tell her about the fire. My wife's principal, when my wife said she was leaving school, actually asked "Did you know your house was burning before you came to work?" Absolutely a true story.)

No moral to this story except that when it's hot and you're tired don't work with power tools.

End result was a week in the hospital (missed our 25th anniversary and my DW's birthday) and only 9 prints on a 10 print card.

Blast, my best to your neighbor and I don't think I'm moving to your neighboorhood any time soon.