Adventure is not always positive

We were driving on the way back from dinner to our campaign office when we passed a car wreck. We didn’t hear it, but it must have just happened, as no one was standing around the cars, and the drivers were still in their cars. I looked down from the very large SUV we were driving to see one of the drivers unconscious, slumped awkwardly across the front seats, facing the rear left of the car. She must not have been wearing her seatbelt.

I told the driver to stop the car. It was the unconsciousness that compelled me. My Eagle Scout reflexes were kicking in. I tend to get very focused and calm in an unknown situation, and I think that’s rare. I’ll switch into this “confidence mode” and people generally are very apt to do what I say when they’re unsure what’s going on. It’s not that I know any better than anyone, it’s just that most of the time in situations like that, people are too scared to take any action, and will just stand around not wanting to make a bigger mess than is already around them.

We stopped the car and were three of the first five people there. A nervous woman asked if we should move the woman in the car. I said “No, don’t move her; let the paramedics do it when they get here.” My Life Saving Merit Badge training dictated that we should leave her alone until help arrived, to avoid further unintentional injury around the neck or head areas. A teenage boy approached and said that the woman was breathing. When he said that, I immediately realized that I’d forgotten that you can move someone if they’re not breathing, to administer CPR. I mean, neck trauma is far less dangerous than suffocation. But despite my own mistake, she was breathing, and it was a moot point.

Now that I’m writing this, perhaps I should have looked at her myself before stating this. It might have been worth moving her if, say, she were massively hemorrhaging.

I approached the other car and asked around if anyone knew what the liquid was dripping out of the crumpled front hood. Someone said that they didn’t. The woman who was conscious in the other car poked her head out and mentioned that the car wasn’t even off. She asked me directly if she thought she should turn the car off. I said, “Yes, please do.” She turned the car off.

A woman who identified herself as a nurse appeared less than a minute afterwards, and while she didn’t move the woman in the car with the unconscious woman, she did open the door and try to talk to her. The teenage boy said that the woman was bleeding from her eyes, but I didn’t crowd around to see for myself.

I asked if someone had called the ambulance. Someone said that they had. Satisfied that all that should have been done was done, I looked up and noticed that one of the other staffers with me had taken to directing traffic around the accident. I didn’t have anything else to do so I stood next to him and waved cars off as well. I was very impressed that he had the presence of mind to act. The other two staffers stood along with the Taco Bell employees who stood by watching and asking an occasional unanswered question.

The police and fire departments arrived in what was probably less than five minutes, to my great relief. They didn’t talk to any of us, but they immediately took out a stretcher and a neck brace for the unconscious woman in the car. We decided that there was nothing we could do at that point, and I agreed. We left.

Anyhow, it was weird. I was glad that we stopped, and while I’m not sure that anything different would have happened if we didn’t, the crumpled car didn’t explode, and the unconscious woman wasn’t unnecessarily moved.

I’m on an adventure, and strange dangerous things happen on adventures.