Any Medical Personnel Who Can Answer a Question?

Factual Questions
1

Hi. I write stories on Wattpad and Fanficton.net but one of my biggest problems in writing stories is that there are times where people get injured, and I don’t know exactly what would be done to help said people.

First, there’s a Rookie Blue fan-fiction I’m writing. At the end of season 4 in the actual show, one of the characters, Sam Swarek, is shot in the stomach. He is conscious on most of the ride to the hospital, but loses consciousness when the ambulance is nearing the hospital. While in surgery, he goes into v-fib. Then, the episode ends. I know that he lives, because it says so in the preview for the next season, but I really need to know about how long it would be until he can get back to work, or at least until he is ambulatory and able to leave the hospital. He is a police officer, by the way, just in case you were wondering what ‘work’ is for him.

Secondly, in another story that I’m writing, a Flashpoint fan-fiction, a person is nearly beaten to death, then she is shot while being brought to an ambulance. She lives, and spends a week in the hospital until the people who had beaten her before abducted her. She goes through two weeks of torture in the building she is being kept in, and that involves being beaten a few times every day to a point where she is near death, but not quite there, and it also involves being stabbed in the abdomen on the first day. The stab wasn’t fatal, and it was with a small knife, so it couldn’t go deep enough to hit an artery or puncture an organ. After the two weeks, she is badly, and I mean very badly beaten to the point where she begins to lose consciousness, and is at risk of dying. The person doing this then shoots her twice in the stomach just before the police come. The offender then commits suicide, and the person is brought to the hospital. She lives, but I just want to know about how long it would be before she would be ambulatory and be able to return to her job (she is a police officer). She has one broken leg, her left wrist is broken, her right arm is broken, and she has a few broken ribs.

If you can let me know the answer to one, or even both of these questions, please do. Thanks. I’m just 13 so it’s not like I have any sort of medical education (even though I wish to get one when I’m older to become a paramedic if I don’t become a police officer)., so I really need to know about how long the times would be for this.

2

I am not a medical professional. What I do know from working in an ER is that V Fib is a Very Bad Thing. It is often not compatible with life, as they say.

Ventricular Fibrillation.

3

Both of these characters sound like tough hombres (is there a female version of hombre?), so let’s say…

1.1 week in the hospital, 5 days in rehab, 2 weeks light duty, then back on the job. He lost part of his colon, and his abdomen is full of adhesions, so he’s bothered by abdominal cramping from time to time the rest of his life. Maybe he carries around a bottle of Pepto Bismol and swigs it now and then, and occasionally mixes it with bourbon and pours it on his breakfast cereal. He’s easily startled by loud noises, which some times set his heart racing with flashbacks.

  1. 3 weeks in the hospital, 2 weeks of inpatient rehab, 8 days of outpatient rehab, never ending visits to various forms of physical therapy, neurology clinics, pain medicine appointments, and psychiatry consultations. She’s got post concussion syndrome and is pretty much debilitated by recurrent severe headaches, tinnitus, difficulty concentrating, and irritability. That on top of panic attacks form PTSD and chronic pain in her back. She becomes highly dependent on pain killers and mood stabilizers, neither of which really work. She goes on indefinite disability. One day she is found dead in bed. She’s got very high levels of prescription narcotics, benzodiazepines, and other medications in her system. People wonder if it was an intentional or accidental overdose.
4

An abdominal wound that goes untreated for two weeks? That’s a case of peritonitis.

5

In American I don’t know, but if you want to borrow a term from Spanish-Spanish after checking with your neighbors south of the Rio Grande that it’s not going to get you in trouble, hembra can be used that way; it’s one of the words meaning female or woman*, and the juxtaposition of consonants turns the usage into a kind of wordplay.

  • Whenever the “gender (M/F)” appears in a form in Spanish, you need to check the initials very carefully, as they may have gone for “sexo (v/h)” (varón/hembra), “sexo (h/m)” (hombre/mujer) or “sexo (v/m)” (varón/mujer). The hombre/hembra pair is never used for obvious reasons.

Kelvlar, it wouldn’t be good for the cases in your OP, but I once got at a library sale a “manual for ship doctors” which described ailments doctors are likely to encounter aboard (including a lot of trauma injuries) and treatments for them, always assuming facilities on the thin side of skimpy. There may be something like that available that you can use if you want to describe “field treatments” in one of your stories.

6

Only if it perforated a viscous (stomach, small intestine, colon), and thus allowed its contents to leak into the abdominal cavity. The OP said it didn’t.

7

Don’t forget the parts where either of them become labeled as a “drug seeker” so the doctor ignores the refill request fax from the pharmacy on a Friday and they can’t get a refill of their pain medicine until four days after the last bottle runs out (ensuring that they have to walk to the pharmacy in a significant amount of pain), the time someone breaks into their apartment to steal The Good Drugs, and when she develops Fibromyalgia later in life, but the doctors ignore her complaints for years and chalk her symptoms up to the trauma she experienced a decade ago.

I mean, if we’re getting realistic here.