Thread: A slightly gruesome question about amputation...

I'm currently working on a Blair Witch style hand-held horror movie. It's low budget but feature length, with the dialogue being mainly improvised by the actors.

It's a sort-of zombie move centering around an outbreak of a rabies-like virus in the UK. It's set 8 months after the initial infection so the few people who are left have formed groups and settled into a routine to protect themselves. It's mainly about their relationships with one another, going stir crazy in this little house, but every now and again there's going to be something really shocking.

One of my characters ends up being bitten on her lower arm. I've been doing a lot of research into rabies and it suggests that a possible cure would be to cut off the infected limb. So my guys are going to try this.

I'm just wondering if anyone knows anything about field surgery, victorian amputations, anything like that. How should they do it and what should they do it with? How to stop her bleeding to death or going into shock? One of the characters is a paramedic. They're in an ordinary house but they could go out on missions to get supplies and the like. I've heard that gunpowder can be used for sealing wounds. Is this true?

Victorian amputations: The procedure has to be done really quickly, because most patients died from shock. They would hold the patient down, some would just get them really drunk, as they cut off the limp tying something above the limb to stem blood flow. He'd get through the flesh with a knife to expose the bone then grab a saw and literally saw through the bone. Then the surgeon would tie off all the blood vessels using thread and stitch the flesh. I heard somewhere that some actually used hot tar to seal the wound. Over all though a lot of patients died from infection and shock. I would think that a paramedic would know how to do this and the likely risks but with no anaesthetic? The patient needs to be a tough little cookie to survive.

Hope that helped a little.

Waste pretty much has it covered. Another thing to think about is where on the arm the bite is so that a cut&tie is most believable - e.g. not so far up that A) you're going to have an unstaunchable wound and also, presuming you're stopping the infection, that it wouldn't have already been recirculated back to the heart and spread to the rest of the body.

Tourniquets can be cloth but are usually rubber or latex (you know, those things they tie around your arm before drawing blood). Leather can also be used--esp belts cinched down really hard. In a pinch, I'd say belts make the best tourniquets.

Tar or even honey (which is so thick provided you have the real stuff and not the watered down stuff) can be used to seal off wounds, but often as not cauterizing the wound with an open flame is used to kill off any bacteria on the stump itself while also sealing the wound. I'd suppose that paint (non-water-or-lead-based) and non-toxic glue (like Elmer's) could also be used.

Surgery is best done while the patient is unconcious because otherwise the heartrate is up and bleeding is worse. Alcohol thins the blood so, unless nothing else is available to knock the patient out or otherwise lesen the pain, it should probably be avoided (though whether your characters know that it another thing entirely).

The paramedic would probably want to set up IV access so he could push drugs and keep the person's blood pressure from diving. To keep it from bleeding, strictly from an EMT point of view, would be to apply pressure to the wound, elevate it above the heart, and apply a tourniquet, which is usually a fat strip of rubber than can be tied into a loose knot (not really a knot, but you get the idea hopefully).

Cool. This is all really helpful. Does anyone know of anything they might be able to find in someone's house that could be used instead of anaesthetic? They're pretty much trapped in at the time this is happening. I was thinking of something like Valium or something, which wouldn't exactly kill the pain but would be a hell of a lot better than nothing.