by Seismic Sam on Thu Jun 13, 2013 9:42 am
Well, as far as where I come from, it's actually unimaginably worse than a normal person can comprehend. Bethesda is THE critical injury/brain injury rehab hospital in Minnesota, and the only place that can compare might be Mayo. We get the worst of the worst, that are barely still living, from any impossibly horrible and unlikely car wreck, 1 in a million accident, or downright dumb decisions. Had a young guy who was going 20 MPH in his pickup, had a brand new $20 hat he really liked, and it blew out of his pickup window. So he opens he door and jumps out of his pickup to get it, and seeing as he's doing 20 when his feet hit the ground he goes straight backwards and COMPLETELY shatters the right/rear side of his skull. I estimate a loss in total skull volume of about 10%, and his face was definitely lopsided on the right. He had 5 buddies who were giving him unmerciful **** when I showed up with Sasha, which was good therapy, but the fact of the matter was that his life was going to be changed forever, and it hadn't even sunk in yet while he was there. And what I see every day is the haunting, omnipresent, regret, pain, and desire to just somehow get back in time before those 3 or 4 seconds of disaster, and have the ability to choose a different path. It eats away at the patients and pretty much their entire families, but you can never go back. Some get past it, some don't, and are haunted by it for the rest of their lives.
So what seems like a ridiculous, asinine, totally improbable assumption about what COULD go wrong in this forum or the rest of the world to normal folks is what I see three times a week for the last 30 months, and the number of destroyed and totally altered lives that we have gotten up close and personal with is probably closing in on 3,000 patients, and that's not even counting family members. Making a mistake with reloading is probably one of the fastest express routes into the world that I work in, and total transit time is probably something like 20 milliseconds. Haven't seen one of those yet that I know of, but I can never ask any questions about any particular situation. So scoff all you want, and feel free about having a cow over how that could NEVER happen to you and I'm a butthead for saying it could. I can say with certainty that 99% of the people Sasha and I see felt that way at one point in their lives that they will NEVER get back.