A few years ago, I was involved in a car accident, the car crashed into a river at the side of the road and I was trapped, unable to move out of my seat and the car quickly filled up with water.
I remember once the car was full with water thinking damn it, I’m a goner and then the next thing I remember is waking up in intensive care at a hospital. During my recovery, I remember someone showing me a video clip a bystander had filmed on their smartphone of the emergency services recovering the car from the water, removing me from the car and paramedics using a defibrillator on me.
I found this both creepy and interesting to watch at the same time. After I was removed from the car and laid on the grass, before the resuscitation had even started, vomit seemed to erupt from my mouth and nose like a volcano and the same happened to me again after the defibrillator was used on me.
What would the reasons have been for me vomiting?
IANAD, but perhaps you had inhaled and swallowed a lot of nasty water, and once you were conscious again your body rejected it?
Perhaps, but from the video I saw, I seemed to spontaneously vomit as soon as I was removed from the car before resuscitation had even begun.
Vomiting is one symptom of shock. You were most likely in shock from the accident and the near drowning.
Yeah, if one’s stomach was uncontrollably and quickly filling up with water whilst they were unconscious it wouldn’t take long for the stomach to forcibly expel it’s contents . . . or so I’ve read.
Your GI tract was shutting down in an effort to keep the rest of you alive, and you vomited so it wouldn’t have to do anything for a while, this on top of you likely having swallowed a lot of polluted water. Yeah, I’m sure you were embarrassed in retrospect, but EMS has seen much, much worse.
(One thing the media didn’t say after the Hudson River plane crash was that lots of people also did this, and anyone who was in the water was charcoaled, to adsorb any jet fuel or other pollutants that were left behind.)