Nurses and/or doctors [paramedics]…
Have you ever seen any accident patients come in who were wearing dirty underwear?
Do you check accident patient’s underwear to see if it is clean or not?
Another thread on underwear prompted me to ask the above question - “Mom always said: Wear clean underwear in case you are in an accident!”
I thought that’s what an accident was…
I asked my mom this once, she’s an ER nurse, and she said no.
I have been taken to the emergency room in all kinds of bad shape and it wasn’t because I neglected to launder my drawers. I am pretty sure that emergency room personnel are used to seeing people covered in blood, piss, poop and every other type of excretion there is. The patients wouldn’t be there if they were having a good day.
You do bring up a good question though. I think that is one of the strangest tropes in all of old-school TV. They wouldn’t show married people sharing beds or shots of toilets but mothers would constantly tell their sons to make sure not to shit their underwear because it might make a bad impression when they get into the inevitable, horrible accident.
It would be like Mike Brady smirking at Jan and Marcia to make sure they have fresh tampons in case they got hit by a bus (cue laughtrack). It somehow seemed perfectly normal at the time. Maybe there was a time when people just walked around with giant skidmarks and would only change their underwear when reminded but that isn’t a world that I want to think about.
My mother told me frequently to “shut my mouth as there was a bus coming.” I never really believed that there was a bus coming, nor that it could possible fit in my mouth. She also told me that “if you keep your face like that, the wind might change and you will be stuck with it.”
If I left my fly open she would say “Watch out, there are ducks about.”
Info from friends (paramedics and ER nurses):
So, in general, they don’t care about dirty underwear.
I wonder if it is typical of some mothers to be more concerned with aesthetics (for lack of a better term) than the actual issue at hand, like some mothers who fret about their child’s hair combing when that child is appear to perform in a piano competition.
Being worried about appearance, dignity and clean underwear, rather than…broken bones or ruptured organs?
Yup.
I remember one patient; cyclist, didn’t make the turn on a long downhill, right into a telephone pole. Knocked unconscious. The back of an ambulance is small; it was quite olfactorily obvious he soiled himself among everything else. In & of itself it wasn’t an issue or concern (other than smell) but it was an indication of how hard he hit/head trauma, which is a concern.
Moderator Action
Since this is looking for personal experiences, let’s move it to IMHO (from GQ).
Hence, “Orange Sky Laundry”, coming soon to a city near you. Lucas Patchett and Nicholas Marchesi, “Young Australian of the Year” 2016.
As an ER doc I’d say this is fairly accurate. It doesn’t happen for all or even most trauma patients but we see it fairly regularly.
This is less accurate. An essential part of evaluating a major trauma patient is removing all of their clothing. That includes underwear. You need to be sure that there are no injuries hidden by the patient’s clothing. Leaving people in soiled clothing is also bad for the skin and can lead to breakdown. I work at a trauma center so we get a lot of transfers from smaller hospitals that can’t handle major trauma. When they transfer me a trauma patient and the patient arrives wearing their original clothing I assume that the transferring facility has no idea what they’re doing with regard to trauma. And besides all that, if the patient has been incontinent, we don’t want to smell it the entire time they’re in the ED. They’re not going to get a full bed bath but they will get a basic cleanup.
That’s my mother. If I am ever hauled away in an ambulance, her worries will be:
In her defense, I suspect it is a defense mechanism. Focus on the trivial, and avoid thinking about the really scary stuff.
That’s not the trope. The trope is being told to “always wear clean underwear”, not “don’t shit yourself”. The former would be particularly pertinent to teenage boys, not being the cleanliest of creatures, who might try to lazy out and not change their underpants as often as they should. The later would be common sense and not need to be spoken to anyone potty trained, even teenage boys.
Yep, my grandmother once told be that it wouldn’t matter if I was wearing clean underwear or not because I’d shit my pants and they cut your clothes off anyway.
I’ve definitely heard plenty of stories about men who were brought in wearing women’s underwear (among other things) so no, EMS and ER personnel aren’t going to notice if your tighty whities (or whatever color they are) are freshly laundered.
Isn’t the old saying that at the time of an accident first you will say it and then you will do it? Then again my profanity of choice is “fuck” so maybe things will end more favorably for me.
I wear torn and dirty underwear when I go out just in case I am in an accident.
Many years ago I got in a car accident and I wasn’t wearing any underwear. Obviously not my biggest concern at the time and in fact, when I woke up in the hospital I didn’t even remember *what *I had been wearing, much less if it included undergarments. Fast forward several years where I’m riding in a limo with the rest of my friend’s bridal party. The limo driver turned out to be not only someone I had known years before but coincidentally he had been one of the EMTs at the scene of my accident. He sure got a kick out of letting me know that fact as well as relating to everyone in the car that I had no underwear on at the time. I think I prefer being caught going commando to wearing stained underwear.
So a semi hauling double trailers swerves into your lane.
You’re about to get fucked.
I once wrote a standup bit on this - “Okay, so you’re careful to wear clean underwear in case you’re in an accident. You’re driving. You hear a huge horn blast and turn to see PETERBILT so clearly you can count the scratches in the chrome. Everyone who still has clean underwear, raise your hand…”