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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12764 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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The reason I say that he was basically already dead was that he was about three minutes from expiring before the cops got there. The cops didn't have an ambulance with them because the caller didn't mention there had been any injuries, no medical emergencies, nothing.

If they had had an ambulance, I'd argue that he'd probably still have died, in that timeframe. The way the wound was described, it seemed like it was basically impossible to fix in the field.

@self_made_human @Throwaway05 If he had received that wound while in the operating room of a hospital surrounded by ready surgeons, could he have survived? Here are sentencing remarks describing the wound:

The knife passed through, several layers of clothing, as demonstrated by the multiple slits in his dark top where the material had been overlaid on itself in the struggle and the single slit in his shirt. It passed upwards through soft tissue, between the two uppermost ribs, catching a lung and cutting an important vein, behind the collar bone. This was to a depth of 8cm from the skin surface. The consequent bleeding flowed into his chest cavity. The pathologist, Amanda Jeffrey, found 1200 ml, or over 2 pints, of blood there. She said that no emergency medical treatment would have permitted access to the bleeding vein. In simple terms, he would not have survived, however quickly he received first aid, CPR or expert medical treatment.

As a rule I don't trust reporting of medical issues (which important vein? that matters a lot and who knows if that is even accurate!), and the UK has a lot less experience with penetrating trauma of all kinds. We can also do miracles if you managed to get stabbed in an operating theater with shit ready to go.*

None of that changes that this happened out in the field with help far away and that any 8cm stab wound into thoracic cavity is going to require a million things going right to be survivable.

*Like given how long it took him to decline I can't imagine that he wouldn't have survived if he was immediately put on ECMO but that is not a reasonable expectation by any means (given their description ECMO could have been impossible but how the fuck did he take so long to die then wasn't it like a half hour?).

I'm not a trauma surgeon, and he'd definitely have died if I was the one responsible for his care. I'm definitely not qualified to gainsay the pathologist here. If that's the subclavian or axillary vein, my hunch is that the odds were very poor, but I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert here. I suppose it also depends on if they had blood products, if the lungs were punctured, and whether a chest drain was available.

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