Warning re. Head Injuries

I'm not sure if this is the right section; if not, I hope the mods will shift it to the right place.

There is no such thing as a head injury which can be assumed to be minor. I learnt this from something which happened on the K & ESR many years ago, and I hope that none of the people concerned will mind me passing on the warning, which might save someone else's life.

A P-way gang was at work removing some rails in a siding. The rails were well and truly stuck in the chairs and the gang were prising them out with crowbars in the fishplate holes. All of a sudden, the rail they were working on sprung loose with a bang, and flipped one of the crowbars through the air as though it was a toothpick. It just clipped Pete, one of the gang, on the side of his head. He lost his balance and fell over, but immediately sat up, and appeared no more than a bit shaken. The wound was bleeding, but not very much, and it appeared to be quite minor. Pete hadn't lost consciousness, and appeared to be perfectly okay apart from a small cut and a bit of a lump - but the ganger was adamant that Pete had to go to hospital, and that he could not drive himself.

So Al took Pete to the hospital in Ashford. On the way, the two were talking, and Pete appeared to be perfectly normal. On arrival, he was taken into a cubicle, and a doctor came in to examine Pete, and was asking him as to how the injury had occurred. All of a sudden, Pete jumped as though someone had stuck a pin in him, looked around and came out with the classic line that you must have seen in films:

"Where am I?"

Al explained that he was in Ashford hospital, because of the crowbar which had hit the side of his head. Pete was utterly bewildered, and had no idea what Al was talking about. The last thing he could remember was driving towards the Railway that morning, several hours before his accident!

Several years later, I was talking to him about it, and he said it was as though someone had made a film of him that morning, chopped several hours out of the middle of the film, and then spliced the ends together - so that, from one frame to the next, he had moved several hours in time and several miles in space, and didn't know how the hell he'd got from one place to the other! Years later, he still had no memory of the events that morning; it wasn't so much a blank spot - more like a time which had never happened at all.

Clearly, even though he hadn't lost consciousness, he had suffered concussion. If it hadn't been for the ganger's insistence, he might have driven himself to hospital and blacked out on the way - or he might just have put a dressing on the cut and carried on working, and maybe collapsed later on his way home.

The moral of the story is, in the case of ANY head injury, no matter how minor it seems, treat it as potentially life threatening - because that's exactly what it is.

Mind how you go, eh?

Jack

 

This also shows the importance of a safety rule that many ignore or don't know about- never use a crowbar to turn rails, always use a proper rail turning tool. I believe that the use of crowbars for this purpose has caused fatalities on the "big" railway.

 

In fairness to both the P-way gang and the K&ESR, this accident did happen a good 25 years ago, or more.

Jack