Cedric Gracia and every riders first aid nightmare

Its only dangerous when If you fall off..

My health insurance says otherwise, it will only pay for half of my medical bills if injury is caused whilst racing downhill on a bicycle.

It can be a dangerous thing to do no matter how much you protest.

is caused whilst racing downhill on a bicycle.

So that would be different to the scenario Crikey outlined then? He specifically mentions holidays as that is analogous to what the majority of riders do.

Typical surrender monkey started talking about dying before his time had come! Should have ridden home one legged 🙂

Sorry stolen from a friends post on my FB made me chuckle!

man, watching that made me sweat. great work from everyone involved and glad cg made it through.

only stw heroes/lowlifes could devolve into an argument over this 🙄

Cedric is very very lucky. If that artery had separated, it’s usually lights out. Certainly on a mountain and without a tourniquet.

Obviously a very serious injury/situation but anyone else think the Fall Guy stuff was weird and in poor taste given that even Gracia thought he was going to die at one point?

Crikey – I’m not saying it’s dangerous. I’m saying there is a degree of risk. Maybe it is skills issue. I’m no super skilled riding hero – but I do try to progress and improve even at my old age. Yes, I like riding DH trails, I like the occasional 6′ – 8′ drop – but I don’t really like doubles. I love very steep technical trails. My general preference is black rather than red routes but also off piste over trail centres.

Maybe this leads to an increased risks…? Wouldn’t say it is a dangerous sport but it can lead to dangerous situations.

Not usualy squeamish but that had my writhing in my seat 😳

Jamj1974.. can you pick my lottery numbers on sat night please ?

ton – Member

I like cedric…..seems like a nice bloke. I would love to buy him a pint.

It looks like he needed several pints; just make sure that you buy him the right blood type! 😉

13 people are killed every year by vending machines falling on them

Lets ban vending machines! 🙄 Or at least require PPE and training to operate them! 😕 (Almost all of the deaths have to be caused by people trying to tip the machine and shake out an item, so natural selection)

Bit worried that if i was bleeding lots some of you would try and put a magic cream on me, rather than trying to stop me from bleeding more.

Jam you need to give up, or ride within your abilities a bit more.

Classic STW… you guys, eh. You are real men. 🙄

Bit worried that if i was bleeding lots some of you would try and put a magic cream on me, rather than trying to stop me from bleeding more.

😆

my mate shattered his pelvis, the surgeon said 25% of people with the type of break he had don’t make it to hospital, because of the massive internal bleeding when they nick that artery

I was with him when he did it, i thank the stars that he didn’t start bleeding like Cedric did, as I would not have been able to deal with it…

You can get Celox gauze which takes any decision making out of the process, you just whap it on straight away to apply pressure with.

wrecker – Member

Cedric is very very lucky. If that artery had separated, it’s usually lights out. Certainly on a mountain and without a tourniquet.

Never been taught to put a tourniquet on a femoral bleed it’s always been pressure like in the video

“He doesn’t care about his shoes… he’s sponsored”

Airway
Breathing
Circulation
Disability
Exposure
Shoes

Very lucky boy…. bleeding like that out in the hills.

Crazy bleeds are worth going prepared for, kit and knowledge. You can change the outcome by doing some thing right there and then.

One question. Would “elevating the bleed” have helped at all in that situation? Seemed he was legs downs the whole time?

(Not a criticism at all, they all did incredibly well considering the unexpected seriousness of the situation!)

He wasn’t bleeding from his legs, but upstream of his legs (in a vascular sense). So you’d have to elevate hips above heart, and it’d make such a negligible difference in that scenario and, more importantly, impede the efforts to apply pressure.

Airway
Breathing
Circulation
Disability
Exposure
Shoes

Like

🙂

FunkyDunc – Member… Jam you need to give up, or ride within your abilities a bit more.

So worst accident happend on a very rainy day on the Cwmcarn DH course, where I exited the tunnel into a cloud making its way in the valley. Couldn’t see a thing and crashed causing the suspected broken neck, torn muscles concussion and facial injuries – despite armour and full face. Next most serious accident happened hitting an unseeable deep hole and going over bars with saddle hitting my lumbar region and almost causing a broken back. So these two were freak accidents rather than skills shortfalls. The degloving of the knee and one leg and arm abrasion was a case of cranking the bike over rather too far in a ford – so a case of pure stupidity. Another concussion with leg and arm abrasion happened with a front wheel washing out and me heading over a precipice – simply I panicked and it all went wrong. One of the fractured arms occurred when I crashed into a fence post – really a case of trying to ride to fast around a bend and going wide.

So I think about 50/50 skills to freak accidents really…

Awesome footage, great calm guy & mates, no flapping probably played a big part in saving him, including doing the corect thing immediately & reassessing the situation.

💡 Gotta think that the open fracture & visible blood loss was a great aid to guiding them, if it was a closed fracture with internal blood loss it would have been a whole heap more difficult to apply the direct pressure in time to save him.

Get well soon GC & hats off to all those around him!!!!!!!! 😛

Worth carrying some cayenne pepper with you to stop bleeding.

You Can Stop Bleeding in Less than 60 Seconds!

C catastrophic haemorrhage
A airway
B breathing
C circulation

If your hosing out like this fella it doesn’t matter how patent your airway is if some one doesn’t stop that bleeding its good night Vienna !

I sent my son on a first aid course before we went cycle touring, to appease his grandad ( just in case, thankfully not needed ). His course was general and was focused more on workplace issues. He watched the video and was impressed with them, and didn’t think that his course really would have helped him prepare for that kind of situation.

Seeing this has reminded me that I should brush up on my skills. Does anyone know of a first aid course aimed more at this kind of thing?

Paul.

This scares me and if it weren’t a freak occurrence, would make me want to bring some of the afore mentioned gauze on rides.

That said, I wouldn’t be prepared and possibly composed enough to deal with it.

“Worth carrying some cayenne pepper with you to stop bleeding.

http://www.gobeyondorganic.com/you-can-stop-bleeding-in-less-than-60-seconds”

FFS. If i’m taking this comment too seriously and missing the irony here I apologise, but i’m really hoping you can’t mean that!

As Tim Minchin put it much better than I ever could:

“Alternative remedies have, by their nature, either not been proven to work, or have been proven to not work. Do you know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work? ….MEDICINE”

Lets not distract from sensible first aid advice with this rubbish.

Cedric has long recovered from this accident and is still riding like he always has. Flat out with style. Our sport is dangerous, as any mountain sport is. If you have a stack miles from civilisation with no phone coverage what do you think will happen? Oh ride within your limits they may say. But the unexpected is around every corner, even trails you know like the back of your hand change week in week out ( unless you just ride fire roads or trail centres), miss a key line and you can be in trouble. If you don’t push your limits you don’t progress. Watching that film made me think, how would you contact help in an area with no phone signal in a similar situation. A bar, brake lever or branch could cause similar damage if you got it in your groin. Obviously if your face/limbs/organs are impervious to rocks/trees and you have mad skills then crashing out as you hoon along the canal towpath to the post office, there is never any danger. But that’s no me or anybody I know, or who have ever met on the trails.

It’s all very well carrying all the gear but not knowing how to use it properly renders it pretty much redundant. The best thing to do would be to get some first aid training which can teach you how to deal with the normal stuff as well as the serious injuries i.e. catastrophic bleeds, sucking chest wounds, collapsed lungs etc, the sort of freakish accident which requires immediate action to stop someone dying in front of you.

Hats off to CG’s companion and CG himself – amazing composure and the right actions meant he didn’t bleed out on the spot. Chapeau, les gars!

I’m not sure whether the lesson is to get really good at first responder stuff, or, to only go riding with Cedric Gracia, who can have horrific accidents then tell his mates how to save his own life while he bleeds like he’s been harpooned.

As for the risk argument- you have to be an idiot to think that mountain biking is without risks. But it’s a big step from that, to thinking it’s dangerous. Serious injuries in our sport are rare, that’s why when it does happen it’s so shocking.

YetiDan – Speaking from experience the stuff does work. Plenty of vids on youtube to show it works. Been used for years.

Cedric has long recovered from this accident and is still riding like he always has.

This was a couple of weeks ago…

My mistake, I thought it was footage of his last massive life threatening crash where he also smashed his hip up last year I think. Nothing stops that man. He is a legend, glad he’s ok.

YetiDan – Speaking from experience the stuff does work. Plenty of vids on youtube to show it works. Been used for years.

Do you not find it strange, though, that the only “evidence” of it working is videos on youtube and hearsay rather than, say, peer reviewed scientific studies?

I work as a Paramedic in London and I have no doubt that if the NHS could save itself £40 each for a blast dressing or chito-gauze (plus the licensing and training burdens that come with drugs such as Tranexamic acid) then they would jump at the chance.

I’m not saying it’s impossible, just that, like homeopathy, it relies on hearsay and noisy proponents more than reasoned arguments and repeatable, peer reviewed experiments and that makes me very suspicious.

This study (for which 80 pigs died!) suggests no difference between Celox, other similar agents and just standard gauze:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/21496135/

If your hosing out like this fella it doesn’t matter how patent your airway is

Am well aware of that fact (work in a Surgical & Trauma Assessment Unit) – I just liked the line about his sponsored shoes. Anyway, full marks to them for staying calm & doing the right thing in a nasty situation.

I did a two day outdoor first aid course with Rick Cotgreave at Pure Outdoor in the Peaks. After that, I feel better prepared to deal with something like that than the usual work based first aid courses.

Having not been in that situation though, I’ve no idea if I’d be that cool and collected or just pap myself.