Day 7, Massive Head Wound Harry

Day 7/46 of my daily Lenten blog journey

Who remembers the old SNL skit, Headwound Harry, with Dana Carvey? Any time I get a patient just spurting blood out of their noggin’ I always think of this sketch and giggle a little.

Well, we had a fine young man come into the ER today, with a bloody head laceration. Apparently, his younger brother pulled the chair out from behind him as he was sitting down, and he fell back and split his scalp on the corner of a beam. The younger brother claims that it was a complete accident. He also says it had nothing to do with exacting revenge on his older brother for pushing him off the play toy at SeaTac airport when he was 5 years old, and consequently breaking his arm.

14 yr old Harry (not his real name), was actually just fine. It was merely a flesh wound, didn’t even need to stitch it up. But the assessment of the wound was made very difficult because of an access issue. In order to visualize the laceration, we had to bypass massive amounts of a long thin keratinized substance. It was just hideous. Harry would later point out that this was actually just his hair. Once we were able to get past the unsightly mop, we found that, although it was bleeding profusely, it was fairly minor. Subsequently, we were able to find a starving, stray dog wandering around outside the hospital to come in and lick his head for about 20 minutes. The bleeding eventually stopped.