My face will fall off

We were sitting in the ambulance hall on a Sunday afternoon and it was a really quiet day when a knock came at the front door and someone yelling they needed help.  My partner opened the door and a guy said “my friend cut himself really bad”. We get this all the time when it is a head wound, they say he almost cut his head off etc and it is a small cut but head wounds bleed bad.  The guy said “he scalped himself, I mean it is really bad”. The guy smelled like the local tavern had ran out of booze serving him.

We got to the car and here is another intoxicated person sitting in the passenger side of the car with a wet towel on his forehead. There wasn’t hardly any blood which was unusual so we thought this really was minor. He seemed fine except for being intoxicated. My partner said “move the towel and let me see it”  The man said “if I do my face will fall off”  My partner said “just remove the towel sir, your face is not going to fall off”  The guys says “ok” and he removes the towel, his face fell off. I mean it, his forehead just flopped over his face and the back part of his scalp fell down his back.

Now remember they tell you in training you can not say “oh shit” or “whoops” or show any kind of reaction. Well it is lucky his face did fall off because both of our mouths flew open and I am sure our eyes were as big as saucers.

There was hardly any blood at all. My partner pulled the pieces back up and bandaged them in place. The intoxicated guys said “I told you so”.  We asked them “what in the world happened. They said he was going to jump the creek on a bicycle and got up on the hill to get a run at it. He was pedaling as fast as he could coming down the hill and hit a rock and flew up in the air and hit his forehead on the handle bars when he landed and cut his head almost off.  My partner explained he was going to be ok but that we were going to take him to the hospital for stitches and xrays.

We loaded him up and off to the hospital we went.  When my partner explained to the doctor what had happened she told the nurse to remove the bandage. The intoxicated guy said “if you do my face will fall off”  The doctor said “then we will put it back, it needs to be sewed back on.”  The intoxicated guy did not want the bandage removed. The doc told him that if they did not sew it back on his face would continue to fall off. He finally agreed and they removed the bandage. The docs face looked a lot like ours did even though we had told her. He only had about two inches at the very back of his head where the scalp was still attached.

When she started to give him shots he decided that was enough, that hurt worse then his head did. He was not a happy camper but they finally got him sewed up.

One of the most unusual injuries I had ever seen. Not much blood but you could see his skull, just like someone had skinned him. He was ok but has a scar for his efforts to be a motorcycle stunt man.