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Show 230 among the school children to broken bones. There were the usual accidents, smashed thumbs which I doused with alcohol and splinted, steel bits in eyes, which could cause blindness. I developed my own technique of drawing these out with powerful magnets; those that were too embedded were sent down the mountain to the doctor. One man nearly sliced off his nose fighting a hornet with an axe. When the artery would not stop bleeding I stopped it with adrenalin left over from another accident. Those bees, which packed an oversupply of formic acid were a menace in themselves. The electrician came in one day with a swollen hand and a sheepish face. I sat him down and soaked his hand for an hour in hot epsom salts and he went back to work. "I never felt it again, " he reported later. Now I am told that ice, not heat, is the proper first-aid application. My neighbor ran her arm through the electric wringer up to her elbow. We had no refrigerators, but outside on the hillside snow could be scooped until June, so I wrapped her whole arm in a pack of snow, which worked. The flotation mill used cyanide and one night a workman got too strong a whiff of it from a vat, luckily not so much that fresh air didn't cure. The chemicals used were sometimes accumulative and the mill superintendent, Mr. Turnbull, a man in his sixties, got such a stiffness in his joints his wife (in her thirties) thought old age had descended suddenly upon him. He was in constant pain and got finally so stiff he could not lift his foot two inches. The culmination of my job as company nurse came on a day in the middle of February. We had been snowed in for three weeks, so when the |
