Road Accident

Traveling in a car is one of the most dangerous things you can do in Africa. More people die in road accidents than by any other cause of preventable injury. Usually it is the case of single cars crashing into each other, but every once in awhile very gory large vehicle collisions occur. The gore is compounded by the fact that people here ride in the back of trucks, which are already piled high with baggage, by the dozen. Sunday night and Monday morning we received 66 patients who were the victims of one such mass casualty event, which occurred at 50km from the hospital. Apparently they were riding in the back of a huge trailer truck, celebrating a soccer team's victory, when the truck skidded out and flipped. Four people died at the scene and the rest were transported urgently to Schweitzer. They were triaged, bandaged, and kept in waiting rooms, consultation rooms, and even outside. We did a lot of x-rays and a lot of wound debridement. And two days later, most of them have returned home cut and bruised, with whip lash, but surprisingly lacking major injuries. There was almost no abdominal or thoracic trauma (only one splenectomy!) and relatively few broken bones. All in all, it was a success for the hospital to manage a mass casualty scene like that and lots of luck that it turned out so well.