Stupidest on the job injury to you or your coworker.

[mycrofft]

(I presume you don't find iatrogenic patient injuries funny. Or, you might....
My partner on the ambulance actually did a "Mother Juggs and Speed" trick, put his weight on a rusty metal expanded screen trailer porch while carrying a pt and his foot went through the step, scratched him a little.
Oh, and of course my crew chief who was bitten by the little girl in an Elavil overdose...
This really IS sort of sadistic, I guess. Oh, well!

 

[traumateam1]

Partner smashed his head on the back read doors locking mechanism that stuck out a good 2", split his head open a little and killer headache for a while. lol it still makes me laugh

 

[mycrofft]

Old crackerbox Army ambulance was a torture chamber.

The worst was the fluorescent lighting fixture running the length of the five foot seven inch ceiling. Sharp metal fins on the diffuser/guard. We took to wearing a helmet, no matter what, back there.

 

[LucidResq]

The time when my SAR team was responding to a call and one POV filled with members rear-ended another POV filled with members at about 30 MPH. We were all wearing seatbelts and were generally ok but a few people had neck pain or other complaints and decided to get checked out on worker's comp. Looked really bad having like 6 people in uniform in the ER.

While we were in the ER that day, a paramedic stuck herself in the lip because she was trying to recap a used needle while holding the cap between her teeth.

 

[mycrofft]

Oh, ouch! Used needle into lip! Bloodborne pathogen concern?

I saw a nurse uncapping an epi Bristoject with her incisors in a bumpy ambulance rip her lip with the needle, but unit was unused.

 

[LucidResq]

I saw a nurse uncapping an epi Bristoject with her incisors in a bumpy ambulance rip her lip with the needle, but unit was unused.

That reminds me of another really good one.

During my EMT-B class one of our skills instructors, a paramedic, was talking about Epi. He was playing with what he thought was an inert trainer, even after one of the students said "hey if that's a trainer why does it have an expiration date?"

Said paramedic went on to demonstrate use of said real epipen, but had it backwards, jabbing the needle into his thumb, which bent the needle at a 90 degree angle and injected the epi.

Embarrassed, he ran to the care of the other instructors/paramedics, who will never ever let him live that down.

 

[JJR512]

My partner and I were putting a loaded stretcher into our ambulance. We had lowered the stretcher a bit to transfer the patient onto it from his hospital bed, and we hadn't raised it, so we were on either side of the head end to lift it up and into the back of the unit. We had just lifted it up and were pulling it in to get it past the safety catch when it stopped moving. I thought it was probably just caught up somehow, it happens a lot if you don't get the angle or position right. So I pushed in on the stretcher harder. I noticed my partner was bending over; I thought he was trying to look under the end of the stretcher to see what the problem was. I just pushed harder. Then my partner cried out, "Stop!", I stopped, and he stepped away, holding his hand up to his chest. He had a nasty little gouge on his index finger, and the surrounding area was darkening.

It turns out he had somehow gotten this finger between the stretcher frame and the red lever used to retract the safety bar from catching on the safety catch when pulling the stretcher out. I think that normally there is a spring in there somewhere that holds the lever or the bar up, but it was broken on this stretcher, letting it just flop down, allowing someone to put their hands in the wrong place to get pinched like this.

The patient was only being transported to a rehab center next door to the hospital where we picked him up, and my partner did not believe his finger was broken, so we did the transport before contacting our office. My partner did not believe he needed to go to an emergency room immediately, so we returned to the office, from where he was going to go to the immediate care clinic my company uses for non-emergent work-related injuries. There was another employee whose partner had called out, so she was told to go out with me.

Now the stupidest work-related injury was not the one I just described my partner getting. The stupidest work-related injury was the exactly identical injury his replacement got on our very next call while doing the exact same thing after being warned and shown what not to do!

 

[traumateam1]

My partner had for some reason thrown a used needle into a garbage bag, not the bio containter. He emptied the garbage out after a call and as luck would have it, the needle jabbed him in the leg.

 

[keith10247]

I still love the one where someone left a roll of packing tape in the middle of the bay floor (that holds 6 units) and one of our member managed to find that roll of tape and accidently stepped on it, rolling his ankle. What are the odds?

 

[mycrofft]

lucidresq, that's another dangerous one.

Hope the epi didn't cause the thumbtip to necrose!!
Dang, ths is a scarey thread!

 

[mycrofft]

JJR512....does that count as a repetitive motion injury?

One of those moments the mouth goes "uh-uh-uh!" intead of "Put it down put it down put it down!"?

 

[mycrofft]

(Youch!)Traumateam I had a coworker put used lancets in a trashcan bag.

the new safety ones. I was wearing gloves and felt the point scritch the glove.

 

[mycrofft]

keith10247, Murphy's Law I tells ya!

Try this experiment:
take a lug nut off a shelf, and a lug nut off your car. Drop both in one corner of the equipment room floor. The shelf one will drop like a beanbag, and your will roll like a bunny and down the drain in the middle of the garage.

 

[mycrofft]

A USAF Disaster Preparedness instructor told this one on himself:

After a disorganized mobilization drill he was rearranging his instruction materials which had been mixed into the real materials, went to show a class how the atropine injector works, heard a click and felt a jab in his thigh.

He says "I froze, because they told us it would kill you if you hadn't been exposed to nerve agent. I waited a second. Then I was holding still, and said "I'm still ok, someone call the ambulance".

 

[traumateam1]

Dang, ths is a scarey thread!

I'm gonna have to agree with you here mycrofft. Kinda looking forward to hearing some other ways people get hurt haha...

 

[EMT-P633]

got to watch my partner (she is also the FTO) inject the B.I.G. interosious training needle into the palm of her hand

 

[keith10247]

That is probably the most effective training she has ever had! That one will most likely stick with her for a long time to come. I must say, those things are scary to play with...some of the guys spent about an hour trying to figure out how to reload it after trying to inject a piece of plywood. I was waiting to see which one of them would get it stuck in them or would lose an eye first.

 

[Buzz]

Last night, my partner and I were coming through the security doors at a nursing home (this particular one had two sets... one to enter the stairwell from outside and one to enter the stairwell from inside). I was pulling the foot of the stretcher and I'm not quite sure what he was doing, but I stopped to avoid plowing into a woman in a wheelchair just around the corner. Of course me stopping thus made the stretcher stop.. My partner on the other hand was following too close and did not stop and caught the corner of the stretcher with his groin.. pretty hard too, judging by how hard the stretcher was pushed into me. h34r:

Following along with the groin injury, I was once putting a patient in the ambulance and had a little incident of my own. I was pushing the stretcher in and it managed to catch part of the locking mechanism which jarred the patient and because of the angle I was on and my height, drove the stretcher right into my stomach. Knocked the wind right out of me lol.

I hit my head on the "oh-:censored::censored::censored::censored:" bar the night before last. I was checking out the truck and stood up to check the airway supplies cabinet (we keep them in one of the upper cabinets) and caught my head on the bar. I was a little dizzy for a minute or two... Didn't realize it until yesterday morning in the shower when I found quite a bit of dried blood in my hair, but I was apparently bleeding quite a bit from it... and had quite a large bump.

 

[mycrofft]

Buzz, you have my permission to keep the heck away from me!

I almost gave out an OJI when we were wheeling a non-emergent patient to the infirmary, me in the front and him in the rear, and my excitable-boy co-worker tries to make me go faster by pushing faster. The litter (cot) was in the full-down position for safety and I had the short handle in front so he kept hitting me in the achilles tendons and calves. I finally threaterned to "knock him on his" arse if he didn't settle down.

 

[So. IL Medic]

Had a brand new student on board (she still had the tag on) riding in back and we got a call for chest pain, enroute we were informed the pt had become unresponsive. We arrive and as my partner and I get out of the cab, we hear the rear doors fly open, and quick scream and a whump. Get around to the back of the truck and there is our dear student, face down, spread eagle, on the driveway. Evidently, got a little excited and tangled up when trying to exit and faceplanted on the pavement.

My partner, bless him, in a calm voice says, "step one: scene safety."