Personal subject matter expert ESR comments on what the "internal bleeding" reports mean about the injured ICE agent (if true, of course).
As in, ESR almost died from this once:
Eric S. Raymond @esrtweet
From the replies I got to this post, some of y'all need a tutorial in the diagnosis and management of blunt trauma injuries. While I'm not a doctor, this is something I know a bit about from both book study and some grim personal experience.
So. Jonathan Ross got hit by a 2-ton SUV traveling at low speed. We know it was low speed, because if it weren't, he would be dead and we wouldn't be having this conversation.
The effect of that kind of collision is a lot like being whanged by an oversized baseball bat. This is not trivial shit, not just "bruising"....
[In detail, elsewhere he explains this is from the force being transmitted by muscles into the internal viscera.]
Yes, you can be ambulatory after that, and he was, but this is a category of injury that can and not infrequently does kill you later even if adrenaline powers you through the prompt effects.
The problem is that the damage from internal bleeding is cumulative, subtle, and hard to diagnose from the outside unless you get really obvious symptoms like blood in your stool. I nearly died from this once myself, which is how I know about this.
So he went straight to the emergency room. Standard protocol is to put him under close observation and do some diagnostic imaging. If he's bleeding badly enough to have trouble standing, it's surgery time - you need to go in, find the bleeders and repair them.
Fortunately Ross wasn't injured that badly. But don't make any mistake about this, anytime you have viscera injury you were only a few pounds of applied force from death. It's plain blind luck that [driver] Good didn't kill him.
You don't want to surgically intervene if you don't have to, because the trauma from the surgery can be as bad or worse than the injury. So you keep him under observation for a while and then you send him home with instructions to self-monitor for indications that the internal bleeding has become serious. Indications: blood in the stool, bloating, persistent abdominal pain.
If he survives 48 hours without increased symptoms, he'll probably be okay and no further treatment required. I think this period is already past us. But believe me, he's going to be under instructions to take it easy and not stress the bleeders for at least a week.
