Drummergirl's first actual car accident response

Yesterday started out in what seemed to be a normal fashion. We get out the door a little later than we'd planned so my husband decided to stop and get a chicken breakfast sandwich from McDonald's.

As he pulls off the offramp, someone comes flying up on his ass, has to slam on their brakes, then agressively goes around. He flies through a red light and lane changes a few lanes without a blinker.

I mutter, "Where's a cop when you need one?"

My husband just flipped the guy off, and we pull into the drive through.

The guy he flipped off turns his car around, chases us, gets out of his car, and starts yelling at hubby in the drive through. I don't remember the exact details of the conversation, but it equated to the guy didn't seem to think he'd done anything wrong and denied it.

He's flashing his badge (turns out he's a cop, whoops) and says, "You should be more careful who you flip off!" and starts freaking out.

My husband is not impressed and looks up at him. "Yeah, I might flip off a mentally unstable cop."

The guy flips out more. The drive through people ask that they take it somewhere else. Husband says, "Sorry, there's a cop out here who thinks he's God."

Then the guy is REALLY pissed, but he storms off with some vague threat. He'd been sort of making threats the whole time.

Finally he leaves and we're like "meh, whatever, he just proved he deserved the finger."

We keep on driving thinking it wouldn't get any weirder. We're driving down I-90 when traffic suddenly stops. Hubby slams on the brakes and we see a car veer to the side. It's pretty obviously an accident, so we start to drive around it. When I see that the woman in the front car isn't moving, I urge him to pull over. Hubby calls 911 and I race out into the freeway, thankfully there's only one lane of traffic and it's moving slow. I hold up my hand to stop traffic and cross to her car. The guy from the van that hit her is looking pretty upset that she's not moving, and he takes one look and starts asking for someone to call 911. Hubby is already on the phone.

I immediately forgot just about everything (in truth, all training I'd had went straight out the window) and started operating on instinct and let my brain catch up as it would. Otherwise, I knew I'd freeze, but I figured so long as I kept coming up with things to do or ask, it'd be okay. I opened the car door slowly and asked her not to move. I told her I was there to help her, and asked her what hurt (neck and back). Her breathing looked good, her radial pulse was there but fast, and I had her squeeze my hand and tell me what day it was. She hasn't blacked out (thank goodness) and didn't seem to have any damage on her, so I figured the best bet was to keep her right there and still until the EMTs showed up. I got her seatbelt off carefully (it wasn't holding her up or anything where she was at, and it was just one more thing in the way), and saw she wore a Microsoft badge. I asked her if I could take a look at it, although asking her name would probably be easier now that I think about it.

Once I had her name, I kept saying it and told her I worked at Microsoft, too. She wanted us to get a hold of her boss, so my husband started on that. I ran around to the far side of the car to get her wallet so it would be there if anyone needed her ID.

An actual EMT arrived then from a passing car, and he held her neck in place while I kept talking to her. I should have thought of holding her head in place, but since she seemed to be stable I'd been hesitant to risk doing too much. Although I think I did quite well for my first car accident response as a random bystander. She really appreciated us being there.

I think I remembered most of the things I needed to remember; forgot a couple of obvious ones like turning off the car (doh) and asking her age, which we got when the police arrived. I had positive handoff to EMS when I met them and relayed her name, age, and condition (yellow based on breathing, pulse, and mental state). They wanted to know how many patients, and it was just one - the other guys were moving around fine.

My husband sent her a mail with pictures of the scene when we got to work, and we heard from her later in the day. She was very thankful and called us heroes. That felt good even though I can't say I feel really like a hero. I'm just a girl who likes to help people. She's got back and neck pain and her left arm hurts, but nothing was broken and the ER sent her home with some painkillers (they took her to the hospital not far from work).

Hubby has a picture of the rear end of the car completely crunched with me next to the woman looking kind of "wha?".

All in all, an interesting day. I was completely wired after I left the scene, it was stronger than coffee. I was totally awake all day. I'm so glad I got to help someone, and that I actually managed to get most of it right. Not bad for my first actual response to an accident (I'm not counting the fender bender where everyone was up and walking afterwards), and considering I was probably half asleep when we came up on it. I learned a lot for the next time (yes, I'm sure they'll be a next time because now that I know I can manage myself well, I'll be stopping at every car accident that doesn't have response already on site).

Planning on sending the woman some flowers next week. I think she could use it.

Two cool things

I started college again this week - hubby and I decided it was time to get off our butts, so we signed up for classes. We're doing the online sort of thing, but it works because of our crazy schedules.

And CERT training starts this week - it's Community Emergency Response Team training. Learning how to deal with major disasters and triaging patients and search and rescue and lots of other fun things. I'm pretty excited about it.