Mietzke's Holden Adventure

Okay perhaps you have noticed a dearth of Blog posts for the last ten days, and then a glut a couple of days ago, yep my fault. I have been in a ten day Wilderness first responder course for the last week and a half. Before we started the course everyone said that we weren’t going to be able to do anything else while it was going on. I thought that just meant work, nope it meant anything. Ang has written a bunch of posts, but she hasn’t learned how to upload them yet, and I was so busy that I didn’t get around to it.
Wilderness First Responder is somewhere between first aid training and an Emergency Medical Technician course. Wilderness First aid is 16-24 hours, First responder is 80 hours and EMT is 180 hours. The course was a blast, I enjoyed everything about it. We had two instructors trading off on the classroom portion of the course. A good half of the course was outside performing practice scenarios. We started off learning basic patient assessment, and went on to the many and varied injuries, and medical emergencies that occur in the back country.
We had two big scenarios; the first was a mass casualty drill. There were four patients with ranging injuries from a kidney bleed to an amputated hand to a femur fracture. The second was my favorite we went out at 7:00 in the evening and were with out patients until well after dark. Once we got our patients out of immediate danger we were able to monitor and plan what we would do in the morning. We’ve been sworn to secrecy on exactly what the scenarios are, so I’m not going to give too many details, but suffice it to say that it was a great class and the scenarios made it a lot of fun. I'm thinking that when we leave here I may go take a wilderness EMT course.