Troops unite to save soldier knifed in head

[unhappycamper]

Troops unite to save soldier knifed in head
By Patrick Winn - Staff writer
Posted : Monday Oct 22, 2007 6:36:44 EDT

It felt like a nasty sucker punch. Yet when he strained his eyes to the hard right, there was something that didn’t belong: the pewter-colored contour of a knife handle jutting from his skull.

Sgt. Dan Powers, stabbed in the head by an insurgent on the streets of East Baghdad, triggered a modern miracle of military medicine, logistics, technology and air power.

His survival relied on the Army’s top vascular neurosurgeon guiding Iraq-based U.S. military physicians via laptop, the Air Force’s third nonstop medical evacuation from Central Command to America, and the best physicians Bethesda National Naval Medical Center in Maryland could offer.

~snip~

Balad’s head and neck team was accustomed to gory head wounds, skulls split by bullets and IED-borne shrapnel. But Powers’ injury “had to be the most amazing thing anyone in the room had ever seen,” Teff said. An X-ray revealed that the knife entered just below Powers’ helmet, above his cheekbone, “skating right along the base of the cavity we call the temporal fossa, where the temporal lobe of your brain lives,” Teff said. It also penetrated his cavernous sinus, where a bundle of veins supply blood to the brain’s right side.

~snip~

After landing at Balad, the loadmaster, Staff Sgt. Matthew Nemeth, began readying the aircraft for a medical evacuation. They briefed him on the details: one guy with a knife in his head, another soldier with a gunshot wound to the neck added at the last minute. A seven-person medical crew expected to board soon. Keep down the turbulence and restrict the cabin pressure to 4,000 feet.


Rest of article at: http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2007/10/airforce_powers_071022/

[man4allcats]

1. A famous traumatic brain injury from the 19th century...

by Shelley Batts in her neuroscience blog Retrospectacle:

Phineas Gage was the ultimate average joe--a railway foreman who was laying down track outside Cavendish, Vermont in the fall of 1848. It was on the job that he suffered an extremely traumatic injury to his brain which altered his personality forever. As he was loading a hole with gunpowder, he was distracted and packed it wrong, bringing down an large tamping iron into the hole without the requisite sand. The gunpowder exploded, blasting the 3-foot-long tamping iron straight through Gage's left cheek and out the top of his skull. Amazingly, he survived, but the iron had severely damaged his anterior frontal cortex (there is debate as to both sides, or only the left was destroyed). Despite profuse bleeding, Gage regained consciousness rapidly and after being seen by a Dr. Harlow, seemed to make a full recovery.

[unhappycamper]

2. Phineas Gage's skull is at a Harvard facility near the Logwood hospital center

in Boston.

[man4allcats]

3. It just goes to show

that, at least in years passed, there was a time when an average person who was willing to give it all they had could in fact get into Harvard. ;-)