Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by David Aiken (A) on February 13, 2008 at 12:42:47

In Reply to: RE: You missed a few things, apparently: posted by Audiophilander on January 27, 2008 at 12:03:04

I had a holiday job in a confectionary factory when I was in high school. One of my jobs was to staple up the shipping cartons, cartons that held a bulk amount of packaged confectionary. The staples were those big brass staples you see in the cartons a lot of audio/HT gear comes in.

One day my right index finger got in the way and I put a staple all the way through it. It went in through the nail and came out the other side, luckily missing the bone. I remember looking at my finger with some interest at the time and then walking out to the boss' office to say that I had a problem. No screams or anything, no pain. I just looked and then walked and spoke to the boss as if we were having a casual chat. While my finger certainly wasn't worrying me, I remember thinking it seemed to worry him a little excessively at the time.

I was taken to the local hospital's emergency unit, 3 or 4 blocks down the road where they looked at me and told me to wait. 45 minutes later, with no treatment, they decided to deal with me. I was still having no pain. They gave me an injection of local anaesthetic into the finger but put it in too close to the base of the finger to numb the tip. Things started to hurt at that stage so they then gave me a second injection closer to the tip, waited for that to take effect, then removed the staple. I think if they had seen me immediately and not let me wait for 45 minutes, they could have removed the staple without anaesthetic. I also wonder whether one effect of the anaesthetic was to reduce the amount of 'protection' I was getting from shock and, paradoxically, trigger the return of pain given that they put the first injection in too far away to actually numb the finger tip where the staple was.

A staple isn't a piece of structural steel and a finger isn't a shoulder, but shock is surprisingly effective at shutting out pain and letting you function reasonably well. It's a protective mechanism so that shouldn't be surprising. If the best thing the brain can do to get you out of a situation alive is to kill pain while leaving you on your feet and moving, it can certainly do so. You do feel a little disconnected from what's going on, as I certainly did, but that's probably a plus as well.

I suspect this particular incident in Cloverfield was a bit extreme as an example but I think it is certainly within the realm of possibility. Provided there was no significant blood loss, and there may not have been while the steel was embedded so the only real blood loss would come when the person was lifted off the steel spike and that was dealt with on screen, then I think the person could keep functioning for quite a while but they would come to a stop hard when there was a pressure let off. I think that would have occurred when they reached the evac site and I think the girl would probably have crashed out on getting into the helicopter. I think her level of functioning after the helicopter crash is much less plausible than her level of functioning between her rescue and their arrival at the evac site.



David Aiken