Life can be Cruel!

He was lying on the concrete floor. We found out later that he was only eighteen. We were inside a large industrial building and the young guy was our patient. He was an apprentice and had been working on a large industrial transformer. This was a place where they were built.

He had been approximately 10 feet from the floor, standing on scaffolding, when something went horribly wrong. He had received a massive electrical shock and was thrown from the scaffold onto the floor where he was found. At the time we did not know how much voltage was involved.

As I approached him I let out a sigh of relief. He was conscious and he was talking. Thank god I thought to myself. These were good signs. He was alert, his Glasgow Coma Scale (a measurement of his conscious level), was a maximum of 15. Despite the fall he appeared to have escaped serious injury. Everything was going to be Ok.

 I was so wrong!

While we were talking to him I noticed something that I had never seen before. Not that calls such as this were common. He was sweating beads of straw coloured fluid. It seemed that plasma was oozing from his pores. This worried me; hopefully the patient had not seen my look of concern.

Due to the potential seriousness of the incident, we treated our patient and removed him to the ambulance quickly, conveying him to hospital under emergency conditions and alerting the hospital of our impending arrival. I recall his mother waiting for him at the hospital when we arrived. I believe her sons employers had alerted her to what had happened. She looked relieved.

I was right to be concerned. Our patient was eventually transferred to our regional Burns unit in Billericay, Essex where he died approximately two weeks later. His death was slow and he underwent amputations before he finally succumbed.

Why? You ask!

I am not an expert on these matters but when electricity of sufficiently high voltage passes through the body it causes tissue heating and internal burns due to the large energy. The current will pass along pathways of least resistance for example nerves and blood vessels. The patients internal organs gradually failed, because they had been cooked, causing the patients death and there was nothing that anyone could do to prevent it. 

A tragic loss of a young life! Life can be so cruel!