When our crew is dispatched to an extremely rural location, they find our patient has fallen off an a-frame ladder and been impaled in the chest by a large piece of rebar on the ground. We know that in dealing with impalements, removal or jostling of the object can cause a host of problems for the patient, so the team must take great care in transporting him to a location where removal and treatment can occur in a safe and controlled environment. Listen in as our team coordinates with other first responders, readies their equipment mise en place, and communicates to ensure the best outcome for our patient. You'll find he is simultaneously very unlucky, and extraordinarily lucky in his unusual case.

Our crew was dispatched to a high energy, rollover MVC with a patient ejection, which usually demands aggressive trauma protocols. But what happens when the patient is equipped with a HeartMate II, a Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD) that pumps blood for failing hearts. The irony is that this extremely sophisticated medical device that keeps our patient alive, also precludes our team from gathering regular vital signs, like a palpable pulse or traditional blood pressure measurements. How does the team manage a trauma resuscitation when the patient's circulation is a continuous flow rather than a beat? The trick is going to back to the basics of trauma care. Listen in and find out how this case unfurled.

On this show we have espoused the general guiding principal of "when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras." Sometimes the hoofbeats actually are those of zebras. But what if sometimes there not even zebras, they're unicorns? On this episode of AMPED, our patient has been bitten by a Jameson's Mamba, one of the deadliest snakes in the world. Thankfully, he is an expert herpetologist who is able to talk our team through the steps needed to save his life. But what our team learns is that sometimes that which seems extremely rare results in care that isn't rare at all.

A brutal incident where a woman gets hit by a truck leaves her with a multitude of injuries, most notably both of her legs bent into a position best described as "frog legs." She's in good spirits and her vitals are good, but her legs bent at that angle means that she cannot fit into our team's helicopter. How does our team get her legs back into place without causing further trauma or risking her stable vitals? Complicating factors is the extremely uneven ground because they're in a cow pasture and the risk of infection is extremely high because the team and the patient are surrounded by cow patties. There is no training for this exact scenario, so how does our team adapt and apply the training they have to this unique situation? This episode of AMPED digs in.