Good for this girl! I read on MSN News that a 12-year-old girl from Massachusetts used a tourniquet method she read about in the Hunger Games books. The girl, Megan Gething, and a friend, Mackenzie George, also 12, were playing near their home when Mackenzie slipped and gashed her leg open on a metal pump. Her leg was spewing blood out of a 10-inch-long, 3-inch-wide gash, according to the report. Now, that would totally freak out most 12-year-olds, in my opinion, but the quick-thinking Megan remembered a scene from the Hunger Games book in which a tourniquet was used to stop bleeding.
She used a pair of shorts and wrapped them around her friend’s leg to slow the bleeding. She asked another girl who was with them to run for help. When Megan’s father arrived on the scene, he helped move the injured girl back to their house, where she was transported by ambulance to a nearby hospital.
As it turns out, the girls were walking alongside a muddy bank and Mackenzie was trying to retrieve shoes that had been left alongside it. She slipped and fell down the muddy part, and slid into some metal embedded in the bank. Ouch! By all accounts, if Mackenzie had been by herself, or Megan hadn’t known what to do, she could have bled out.
Do you ever feel that sometimes you’re being given messages that you can’t ignore? I’d been thinking a lot about vulnerability if me or my family gets injured and there’s no help, either from a SHTF situation or if we’re in an accident or whatever. Then survivor guru Dave Canterbury came out with a new book, Bushcraft First Aid, then I got to interview Tom Kaleta of Blue Force Gear about their Micro Trauma Kit NOW!, which holds items designed to treat the top three most common battlefield (or concrete jungle) injuries. It’s all adding to to the message that we need to be prepared to take care of ourselves, from the minorest scratch with a Band-Aid to serious injuries. The more you know, the better you can help yourself, your family or anyone you encounter who is injured…maybe on a hiking trail, in a car accident, or even, as we are hearing about with this shooting of Senators in Virginia while they were playing baseball, on a baseball field.
Take a first-aid class. But don’t stop there. Give your kids some basic knowledge. I don’t really care how they learn. It’s fantastic that a scene in the Hunger Games helped prepare young Megan Gething for this scenario, and hopefully the millions of other young people who read that book learned something too, but that’s only one small part of self-preparedness. There’s a lot to learn. You’re on your self-preparedness journey, first aid is a path you can take along with your kids.
