[Kids talking] "Are you okay? I'm going to get help!"
Now let's cover cold emergencies. In this situation we had two children possibly lost
for a while, or played outside in bad conditions without enough warming and insulation in their
clothing, and they started to feel the effects of hypothermia. You know, hypothermia begins
when they start shivering. And once the body drops below 95 degrees Fahrenheit at the core
temp, serious side effects begin to take effect. Dizziness, delirium, confusion, the shivering
begins to stop. They become lethargic, weak, and then lose consciousness. Now the treatment
for hypothermia is that we need to insulate their body as best we can while we wait for
EMS to arrive, or remove them from the environment into a permanent warming area. If we're out
in the field like this, obviously we need to get help to come to us. We're going to
have to help protect them while we're here. And the way we do that, a really good way
is to have a waterproof blanket made out of Mylar. These are very common in first aid
kits. And I'm strongly encourage you to have them whenever you have a first aid kit or
an emergency kit that you have in your vehicle or with your rescue bag. These Mylar blankets
are really designed to help reflect the heat of the patient. They're normally large enough
that they would certainly be okay for a child and big enough for most adults. But our whole
goal here is to actually have the patient roll towards us being extremely gentle with
the child. If they have frozen parts, frostbitten parts, we don't want to agitate those parts
anymore than we have to as we could give crystals in their bloodstream. Make those kind of move
and it could actually put them in cardiac arrest, so we want to be careful about that.
Now what I'm doing here is I'm just untucking part of the blanket, and tucking the other
half underneath the patient's body. What we're gonna do is we're gonna roll the patient then
back onto this Mylar blanket. I'm gonna roll you over a little bit. We're gonna get you
help here, honey, in just a little bit. I know you're super cold. Untuck the blanket
on my side, and now they can lay on their back as we pull the rest of this blanket up
and around them insulating their body. Go ahead and straighten your legs out, honey.
I know it's super cold. As we wrap this all the way around, we're gonna try to seal it
around their feet as best we can up up under their chin. But you can't breathe through
this stuff, so it's gonna be vitally important you leave room for them to be able to breathe.
You don't cover their face. Now I'm gonna take another blanket and I'm gonna cover their
body the rest of the way, over their feet and as far up as we can, tucking it all around
underneath and as best we can and then waiting for EMS to arrive. You might notice that we
have this little extra around their head. I might even tuck it around like that. Remember
we lose an immense amount of heat through our scalp and through our head. We want to
try to insulate that and keep them from losing any more heat than they already have. This
is how we're gonna maintain this person that's in hypothermia until EMS or help arrives.
But we're also gonna monitor for airway, breathing and circulation. If they stop breathing and
go unconscious, we're gonna go straight into CPR until help arrives for as long as we possible
can. Remember it's important to protect ourselves as well, the rescuer. I'm kneeling in cold
snow. It's lowering my body temperature. I might need to take my gloves off for dexterity
so it'll be easy for my fingertips to start getting frostnip or frostbite. So remember
scene safety for you as well. Now let's talk about the next piece, and that is frostnip,
frostbite, and how we recognize it and then how we treat it. Out here in the field, we're
not gonna be rewarming any frozen parts. Frostbite is indicated by fully frozen hard ends of
their fingers, nose, cheeks, ears, toes, feet, hands. Those are the most common parts to
freeze first. They're gonna be hard. They're gonna be white, and they're not going to have
much feeling. If we have a person that's still able to walk but they have frozen parts, especially
the feet, we're gonna try to walk them to permanent safety for as long as we can while
their feet are frozen. We don't wanna take the time to rewarm if there's a chance that
they're gonna refreeze again. We don't want to reheat or rewarm any frozen parts of the
body with water hotter than 105 degrees. That's the maximum temperature before we then get
into burns. And in my preference, it might even be a little cooler than that as that
type of temperature can be extremely painful once the nerve endings come back and they
can start feeling again. All rewarming attempts is extremely painful and so we sometimes will
want, if at all possible in advance settings, for some form of analgesia to be applied through
the rewarming, but not to the point where we suppress their ability to breathe on their
own. It's gonna be important that we maintain this body temperature, rewarming, keeping
their core temperature as high as we can until help arrives, and we can get them to permanent
help where we can fully rewarm them and save their life.