Hi there! 
In my current story, one of my main characters is almost done with her training as a nurse/medic at a teaching hospital, and her best friend (who she was separated from a few years ago) is brought in as a stab wound patient. Of course they re-unite again, the stab wounds were inflicted by the totalitarians and there's a rebellion, blah blah. My issue is that I'm not sure exactly what the procedure would be, in terms of how the stab wounds would be treated and handled, and what my character would have to do. I have researched "how to care for stab wounds" but everything I got was mainly either for how to handle it as a layperson while 911 is on the way, or for people who are doctors in hospitals with excellent conditions.
The factors in this scenario are:
- The hospital is in a run-down and mostly abandoned sci-fi city that's devolved into slums. Standards and regulations are much lower, if even existent. People aren't going to med school for 8 years; instead, they learn via apprenticing and hands-on training. The girl performing the healing on her friend is like 17-18 years old and is at the teaching hospital doing a vocational medic/nursing training program in lieu of high school.
- The hospital does not have the resources to have a team of people working on an injured person. Usually it's one medical worker struggling to balance like 3-5 injured people on their own. Obviously many people die due to this. Therefore, the medic girl is responsible for healing her stabbed friend all by herself, since the other workers are stretched too thin with other patients (the city has a lot of violence and chaos.)
- They do have modern style tools and chemicals to heal a stab wound properly. They don't have things like complex heart-pumping machines and life sustaining systems (someone in a coma would be SOL), but they also aren't using medieval blood letting or magic attempts or anything like that. They have tools like gauze, stitches stuff, disinfectants, etc (likely no painkillers or other adequete medications though)
Let's say her friend was stabbed a few times in non-fatal parts of the torso/sides/back, in places not puncturing a vital organ or plunging really deep, but more like side-cuts where the main damage is to the muscle. The main danger is blood loss. She's able to get the equivalent of an ambulance and perform some basic blood-stopping techniques while they arrive, then the paramedics in the ambulance are able to do a temporary patch-up, then the friend/nurse at the hospital has to handle the rest of it.
What would this look like? When the medic friend reaches her in the treatment room, what types of basic care may have already been administered (by either the stab victim herself or the ambulance people) and what would she have to do on the wounds? What would the victim's condition be like? What would be the level of urgency/time frame?
Thank you so much for all your help - if you'd like help on your own question in return, let me know and I'll do my best.
In my current story, one of my main characters is almost done with her training as a nurse/medic at a teaching hospital, and her best friend (who she was separated from a few years ago) is brought in as a stab wound patient. Of course they re-unite again, the stab wounds were inflicted by the totalitarians and there's a rebellion, blah blah. My issue is that I'm not sure exactly what the procedure would be, in terms of how the stab wounds would be treated and handled, and what my character would have to do. I have researched "how to care for stab wounds" but everything I got was mainly either for how to handle it as a layperson while 911 is on the way, or for people who are doctors in hospitals with excellent conditions.
The factors in this scenario are:
- The hospital is in a run-down and mostly abandoned sci-fi city that's devolved into slums. Standards and regulations are much lower, if even existent. People aren't going to med school for 8 years; instead, they learn via apprenticing and hands-on training. The girl performing the healing on her friend is like 17-18 years old and is at the teaching hospital doing a vocational medic/nursing training program in lieu of high school.
- The hospital does not have the resources to have a team of people working on an injured person. Usually it's one medical worker struggling to balance like 3-5 injured people on their own. Obviously many people die due to this. Therefore, the medic girl is responsible for healing her stabbed friend all by herself, since the other workers are stretched too thin with other patients (the city has a lot of violence and chaos.)
- They do have modern style tools and chemicals to heal a stab wound properly. They don't have things like complex heart-pumping machines and life sustaining systems (someone in a coma would be SOL), but they also aren't using medieval blood letting or magic attempts or anything like that. They have tools like gauze, stitches stuff, disinfectants, etc (likely no painkillers or other adequete medications though)
Let's say her friend was stabbed a few times in non-fatal parts of the torso/sides/back, in places not puncturing a vital organ or plunging really deep, but more like side-cuts where the main damage is to the muscle. The main danger is blood loss. She's able to get the equivalent of an ambulance and perform some basic blood-stopping techniques while they arrive, then the paramedics in the ambulance are able to do a temporary patch-up, then the friend/nurse at the hospital has to handle the rest of it.
What would this look like? When the medic friend reaches her in the treatment room, what types of basic care may have already been administered (by either the stab victim herself or the ambulance people) and what would she have to do on the wounds? What would the victim's condition be like? What would be the level of urgency/time frame?
Thank you so much for all your help - if you'd like help on your own question in return, let me know and I'll do my best.
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