I helped the woman get up, then took her place. The driver was a young woman, maybe eighteen years old, with blond hair that was now dirty with blood from an unidentified source. “Hi. I’m Nash. I’m an EMT. Is your name Amber?”
“Y-yes. Amber S-sullivan.”
“Okay, Amber. How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Okay.” While talking to her, I’d done a quick assessment. She’d been wearing her seatbelt, and thank god for that, or shewould’ve been dead on impact, but the crushed roof meant she was now trapped. “Can you tell me where it hurts?”
“E-verywhere.”
“I’m sure it does. Where does it hurt the most?”
“I… I can’t feel my legs.”
Oh fuck. Possible spinal injury. “Okay.”
“Is that bad?”
“Well, there could be a lot of different reasons for it, which we’ll need to figure out, but let’s take it one step at a time, okay? Can you breathe okay?”
In the meantime, I had cleared the window of the remaining glass so I had space to work without having to worry about cutting an artery myself.
“Y-yes.”
“No shortness of breath?”
“No.”
“Take a real deep, slow breath for me.”
She did, and her chest expanded. Good, she had air. “I’m gonna feel your pulse now, okay?”
I waited for her faint reply, then put my fingers on her neck to feel her carotid. She had a pulse, but it wasn’t a strong one. She was bleeding somewhere. No surprise there. “Can you tell me if you’re bleeding anywhere?”
Behind me, sirens had indicated the arrival of Engine 3, whose crew would be tasked with getting her out, but not before I finished my initial assessment.
“My legs are bleeding, I think. I can’t feel them, but there’s blood down there. I…I touched it.”
“Okay.”
Kaelan knelt next to me. “Truck driver is a 4-4.”
I held back a curse at hearing the code for a drunk driver. “Let dispatch know so they can send in the cops. And tell Engine3 to bring out the Jaws of Life to extract her. By the time they’re set up, I’ll have her assessed and ready to be moved.”
“On it.”
I grabbed a blood pressure monitor. “Can you extend your left arm for me, Amber? I need to take your blood pressure.”
She did, and her hand was covered in dried blood. I wrapped the cuff around her arm and let the machine do its job while I quickly checked her hand. She had a few scratches there, but nothing major, so the blood was coming from somewhere else.
Her blood pressure was 90/50, and I didn’t like that one bit. She was bleeding out somewhere, and my money was on her legs. “I’m gonna hook you up to an IV so we can get some fluids in you. Just keep your wrist there.”
It didn’t take me long to hook her up to a large-bore IV, and by then, Engine 3 was working around me to assess the car and make a plan to get her out of there. “Amber, the firefighters are here to get you out, so I’m gonna step back and let them do their job, okay?”
I pushed myself to my feet.
“What’s her condition?” Gifford, the chief of Engine 3, asked me.
