Penguin gait, air sled and shot from a gas pistol: New Year's stories of Vitebsk residents from traumatologists

Vasily Stepanov and Nikolay Stepanov Topic news

Not everyone will celebrate the cozy and wonderful holiday of waiting for updates at home at the festive table to the sound of the chimes. Many drivers, machinists, pilots, conductors, salespeople, cooks, and waiters will definitely not be resting. Will remain at postlaw enforcement officers , rescuers, doctors. Surely, when meeting with the winter wizard, they would ask to conjure calm December 31st and January 1st. The HEAD of the trauma center of the Vitebsk City Clinical Emergency Hospital, Vasily Stepanov, will also be on duty on New Year’s Eve. Together with a colleague, he told a BELTA correspondent what stories they bring to the traumatologist on holiday.

The comedy that the scripts of famous sitcoms about doctors convey is completely absent in the cases of emergency room patients. It’s not for nothing that a medical history used to be called a mourning sheet. There is pain and tragedy here , even if sometimes a chain of absurd events leads to them. The patients themselves then speak reluctantly about their “adventures” in order to forget quickly. But doctors are ready to describe those spectacular appearances on the threshold of their office in detail even decades later.

“Firecrackers, noise and noise. A man takes a gas pistol and shoots himself in the head,” hospital traumatologist Nikolai Stepanov begins to recall an old episode from his many years of practice. “He comes to us, a circle of relatives brings the patient. His wound is star-shaped, "It's like glass breaking. We look at this wound on the operating table, run over the bone - there are no rough spots anywhere. The bone is clean and smooth, no cracks. We take pictures - there is no fracture. He refuses the offer of hospitalization, signs and leaves to continue celebrating the New Year."

The patient’s relatives then tried to hide the fact that he shot himself in the head, but this cannot be hidden from the experienced eyes of medical workers.

On New Year's Eve itself, there is no queue to see traumatologists - everyone is preparing for a wonderful holiday, making salads and buying gifts, postponing the visit until the first days of January. For example, if on average in winter up to 90 people are admitted to the emergency room per day, then on the night of 2023 there were only six of them. On the afternoon of December 31, 2022, about fifty people asked for help. On the first of January there were already more than 90, and on the second - over 110 people. According to experts, residents of Vitebsk and the region celebrate Catholic and Orthodox Christmas quite calmly.

A little about falling techniques and ski gait. And what does the penguin have to do with it?

“Before going out, it’s better to listen to the weather forecast in the evening,” advises the head of the emergency room, Vasily Stepanov.

He says that if weather forecasters report temperatures close to zero, you need to prepare yourself psychologically: it will be slippery underfoot (no matter how diligently the utility services sprinkle sand on the roads and sidewalks), and there is a risk of falling. Choose low-slip shoes with a wide profile, preferably with ribbed soles.

Particular attention is paid to movement strategies. “There should be a penguin’s gait: small steps and waddling. And so that you don’t have the situation that both or even one leg comes off the surface of the ground. It’s better to glide like on skis,” he describes. “In small steps, almost squatting, so that in case of a fall, sit down and reduce the height. The technique of falling can be different, but you need to focus on the level of physical fitness of the person. If this is an athlete, stuntman or gymnast, then he knows how to fall: group himself, press his head and arms to the chest, roll and injury will not get it. Older people, whose level of physical fitness is already low, will probably not be able to perform such somersaults. And if they can, it may result in even greater injury than after a normal fall. It is better for them to move slowly and avoid dangerous areas: stairs, dimly lit places."

If, nevertheless, a person falls, it is better for him to assess his condition and examine the parts of the body that hurt before getting up. And the main thing is not to rush into self-help right away, call an ambulance. “When there is an obvious deformation or an open fracture, there is bleeding - here it is necessary to approach the provision of medical care very gently, carefully and slowly. Because a person can cause irreparable damage to himself. For example, if you lean on a dislocated arm or an arm with an open fracture and try stand up, then you can damage the neurovascular bundle with bone fragments, which will lead to more severe bleeding or damage to the nerve structures. They will then take a very long time to recover,” says Vasily Stepanov.

Ice injuries this year in Vitebsk began to be recorded at the end of November. Every day, from 20 to 30 people are admitted to the emergency room with them. We are mainly talking about fractures of the radius, surgical neck of the humerus and bruises of these places. These include damage to the ligaments of the knee and ankle joints, fractures of the ankles, and shin bones.

Not all firecrackers work the same

Pyrotraumas have not yet been recorded this winter - firecrackers and firecrackers appear in the arsenal of Vitebsk residents closer to the New Year. They are usually tested after the 20th of December and in the first days of January.

“I remember we admitted a man to the hospital. He had a crushed wound and it was quite serious,” says Nikolai Stepanov about the case when a firecracker exploded right in the hands of an adult man on a holiday night.

People are becoming less cautious because there is too much euphoria during the holidays, doctors say. “Injuries to the upper extremities are more common, there may be separation of fingers, lacerations with damage to tendons, open fractures,” Vasily Stepanov describes the cases that a traumatologist usually has to deal with. “There may be burns to the face, but these patients are then sent to the combustiology department of the regional hospitals where they receive specialized medical care."

The nuances of cleaning snowdrifts. When is it important to read the instructions?

A recent story forced one resident of Vitebsk to reconsider his attitude towards working with personal snow removal equipment. Compact machines are now available to owners of private farmsteads. The man used one of these unsuccessfully.

“In addition to the fact that people are cut by fortunes (popularly called grinders) - this is a high-energy tool, it breaks out of their hands, cuts off fingers, cuts shins, thighs. Now many people have their own snow removal equipment. And recently we received a patient with multiple wounds of the lower extremity received while working on snow removal equipment. So I would like to warn the owners of such equipment: work with it carefully, because you can get a very serious injury," noted the head of the emergency room Vasily Stepanov.

Winter fun as a portal to traumatology

Air sledding and tubing and jumping without a springboard during the New Year period also often force vacationers to rearrange their plans. The cheesecake boom has died down for several years now, and the authorities have banned tubing in unspecified places. There are no permitted locations for these purposes in Vitebsk yet.

“Tubing used to be very common. Then an official ban appeared , and this story, the number of injured people, decreased,” explains Nikolai Stepanov.

Injuries from any skating, he says, are often complex. Either the heel bone breaks when a person rests his foot on a tree or something else, or the vertebrae if he is thrown up. Treatment of spinal compression fractures of varying degrees lasts up to 4 months.

“We had patients who jumped from the third floor and received fractures of both heel bones. These could also be fractures of the legs and hips. Often these injuries are associated with ALCOHOL intoxication. People jump from the second or third floor themselves in order to get out of the room, leaning on one’s own arrogance and thinking that everything will end well,” adds the head of the emergency room.

Requests from the category “cure everything for me.” Patient misconceptions about the emergency room

“It happens that they come: I’m pregnant, what should I do? Or, let’s say, my stomach hurts, or I have some kind of foreign body in my rectum. They come to us, thinking that the emergency room deals with everything,” explains Vasily Stepanov.

In fact, they work here with musculoskeletal injuries. Patients treat the entire spectrum of pathology, and doctors refer the person according to the profile: thoracic, emergency department, to a therapist, neurologist, and so on. So it is on New Year’s Eve, and in general during the winter holidays, when the risk of injury for many increases.

"The main thing is to sit down at the table and celebrate the holiday in a good mood. Understand that life is a miracle, and treat each other and family members with understanding and respect. Drink alcoholic beverages in moderation. If you go out somewhere, be careful move around. And when you use pyrotechnics, move to a safe distance, because firecrackers can change their trajectory and fly not upward, but towards people,” summed up Vasily Stepanov.

In any case, the quality of the holiday will depend on the vacationers themselves. With a reasonable approach and forethought, everyone will celebrate the New Year and spend the Christmas holidays safe and sound.

Evgenia ARKHIPOVA,

Photo by the author,

BELTA.