Today was interesting. At the barn the cowboy was moving the herd that has been grazing on the EBMUD land adjacent. A horse in a paddock of the neighboring vintner became excited and tangled itself in a barbed wire fence. The UPS guy alerted the cowboy and then me. I grabbed a coworker and we headed over to find the cowboy keeping the horse still. UPS and I held the head while cowboy cut the fence. Once we rolled the horse and got him standing I walked him to a round pen in a drier area of the property just a few dozen yards away. That's when the arterial bleeding became apparent.
It's a strange thing; blood. If it is coming out at the right pressure it looks like a solid object and a thin geyser of the stuff is hard to differentiate from another natural object like a stick or piece of grass. A red stick. That's when the brain refocuses and says: "something isn't right here." Thankfully, horses have a lot more blood than humans do. In all my years I think this was the first time I dressed an arterial wound, and in the field no less. I asked my coworker , Brian, for a rag but he couldn't find one in the horse's owners tack trunk. I asked him to keep looking and suddenly he hands me a piece of a sock. The dude tore off his own sock! Awesome. So it worked out quite well, because I was able to fit the sock over the hoof. With the help of Brian's other sock we had ourselves a nicely improvised elastic field dressing. Reduced the arterial flow to almost nil. I waited for the owner and helped her trailer the poor critter. He seemed in good enough spirits. For a guy with two dirty,bloody socks tied around his ankle he was doing pretty well.
A mini-diatribe on the ills of rotational grazing by the cowboy, and one run-into-the-street-suicide-attempting dogs later I was in Berkeley at my class. Then I noticed that I hadn't *quite* washed all the blood from my hands. Never mind those boots of mine. Filthy.
