Dooms day scenarios

My instructors at my EMT school called our Thursday class, the stress class. The mentioned that they would place in hard situation and see how we reacted.

The scenarios consisted of

1. An EMT screw with one student as the incident commander, aka head EMT.
2. The stages of responding to an incident
3. The patient
   
4. Care of the patient
5. Packaging and transport

The details are particularly boring unless you are an EMT nerd and love to debate the virtues of 10 code over plain English at a non-alcoholic mixer. The short of it was that I rocked. The time I have put into my F.D. showed. My stress level was down, my train of thought was right in line with what the patient needed, and I was able to manage my crew like a champ. In the morning that is....

That after noon the instructors decided to give us "the worst of the worst" with yours truly being elected by the class to go first.

When we arrived at the incident location, 4 workers had fallen through the rafters of a housing construction work site. No sooner had I set a staging zone for my crew that they took off in four different directions. As I tried my quickest to triage the patients (2 two red, one yellow, and one green) I was also trying to get them to focus on what I was saying. I would get them collected on a red patient and as soon as I turned my head they would head straight to the patient making the most noise (my green patient, last priority).

To make matters worse, I radioed into our mock medical command asking for and getting approved for a mass causality incident but NO back up resources available except for medivac. No Police, Fire Department, or additional EMS. I'll take what I can get and frankly two choppers would be a big help getting my patients out since I am short a method of transport here.

So there are my people, back on the green patient. I look back to my two reds and notice that they are missing. That's when the instructor tells me they died falling through the roof and are now lying on the bottom of the building. K, screw'em. Can't save a dead person

So I instruct my people to work on our yellow patient. Problem is that they are spending ten minutes just trying to get my last priority patient on a back board. Which is right about the time my yellow patient goes into neurogenic shock. After several commands to get the green patient off the back board and have him walk out (cause he can) my guys are still freaking out and working on the back board. I am holding c-spine on my yellow patient because my crew got tunnel vision and neglected him. Another ten minutes of commands to get the g-d damn back board over to our now red (high priority patient) and the instructor tells me that he is also dead.

Faaaaaawk!. ok. So they still have not put the straps on the now only living patient. I walk over, strap him up and get him out of the rafters all in 30 seconds time. Finally something going somewhat right. I then notice that all of our gear is missing. The instructors are laughing saying that our gear was stolen. F'ers

We get the patient to our ambulance when medical command radio's for medivac arrival. Yes! We get a quick landing zone setup and signal for a landing. We then give the briefing and load the patient onto our make believe chopper.

The pilot asks for an all clear to take-off. I look around for any loose debris and noticed that our medical gear has show back up. I whip around to give a negative on an all clear when I see one of my screw giving a thumbs up. I could only close my eyes as the instructor took a blanket laying on the ground and threw it into the rotors and notified us that the pilot, co-pilot, crew, patient, by-standards, me and my crew had all died in a horrible crash.

my mind was numb

The only good news is that they told me that this scenario is specifically setup to have an 80% causality rate. It's basically a doomsday scenario to see how we handle the stress of something like this. I don't think they have managed to ever see an incident commander manage to get everyone killed though.......... I can still hear them screaming *shutter*