Page 122 - Xmo Strata - Bulletin Archive

Page 2 of 4

His leg was covered in blood and even though it had only been a few seconds since he
had gone through the window, there was blood everywhere. It looked very serious.
Immediately, we put him onto his back and put his leg in the air and promptly started
looking for the source of the bleeding. His leg was covered in blood so I started to feel
for the laceration. It was horrendous! Half of my hand went into his leg, just above his
knee. The cut was projecting spurt after spurt of blood, as if it was surging from 3mm
tubing.

At this point the boys mother was running around in shear panic, whilst his father was
shouting at him for being so stupid. The poor lad Tom, was lying there white as a sheet
shrieking ”Sorry Dad! Sorry Dad!” We got his Dad to hold his leg in the air in an
attempt to stem the bleeding.

We tried to stop the bleeding, by pressing firmly into his groin, but to no avail. Now I
was kneeling in a pool of congealed blood. My wife had gathered some beach towels to
provide a make shift bandage and went on to dress his gaping wound. The blood quickly

immersed the towels as the bleeding persisted.

My wife knew the last resort was a tourniquet. She also knew that his femoral artery had
been severed and if we couldn’t stop the bleeding, he had only minutes to live. I had
once read that an adult has about six minutes to live with an untreated severed femoral
artery.

The tourniquet was applied. The following minutes endured my wife taking regular
observations and endeavoured to calm not only the boy but his brothers and parents.
After about thirty minutes he had started to drift in and out of consciousness, so talking
to him helped him stay awake –apparently only to appease his parents. Unconscious
people in shock can look dead. The Portuguese Police arrived and did absolutely
nothing, they didn’t even get out of their car. Although it seemed like an eternity, the
ambulance arrived a short time after.

The ambulance was nothing more than a transit
van with a stretcher and some first aid bandages.
My wife instructed the ambulance men, via an
interpreter, to set up an intravenous drip of saline
fluid to increase the volume of fluid in his body
and prevent him from going into cardiogenic
shock. To our astonishment, they didn’t have any.
Inevitably, he had by now drifted into
unconsciousness. The ambulance men were calm, very calm, in fact almost in a state of
apathy. It was absolutely infuriating. In sheer frustration, at their lack of provisions and
sense of urgency, my wife was now yelling at them to get a move on.