What do I do if I get impaled?

Question

Okay, really really weird question.

No, I have not been stabbed, no, nobody I care about has been stabbed.

I'm an author. Well, not an official author, but I'm writing a book and I wanted to be as accurate as possible.

One of the characters is in a battle with some stone golems, who are armed with arrow-tipped spears. She decides to try to do some ultimate move where she kicks down one of the golems, jumps on top of it, and smacks a second one with her make-shift weapon, which is just a stone slab, and steal the second golem's spear as a more efficient weapon.

Leaning down to grab said spear, the first golem stirs, but she pays no mind to it, thinking it was just the golem settling, continuing to examine her new weapon.

A sharp and sudden pain engulfs her lower leg, and she almost loses grip of the pointed stick.

Looking down, the first golem has plunged its spear into her calf while her back was turned.

What does she do in this situation? She's smart enough to not remove it, or risk bleeding out. She knows to seek medical help, but there's not much of it where she stands. In a world of fluffy dragons with poisonous saliva and mazes that swallow you whole, not much is structured, including medical systems. The closest thing she has to a doctor is a seamstress and a middle-aged hybrid with experience in this strange land. How would they go about pulling the spear from her leg? Having the spear only a bit in her leg, the pointed side only having about five inches till her leg, the other side being over four feet of rough stone, making it painful to pull out either way.

What's the solution to this unique problem?

Answer 1

This is honestly a wonderful predicament for your character to get into and think this is a great opportunity for you to show how your character may react in this sort of situation.

She's smart enough to not immediately remove it immediately, but is she going to tie a tourniquet like Claudia suggests and then have the confidence (and time!) to remove the item and then go for help. Is the distance to help too long or too treacherous to bring the spear with her?

Or is she cocky and think she can stabilize it well enough to bring the spear (or part of it) with her? Does she think she can remove the spearhead carefully enough to not cause more damage to she can have a professional take care of it?

Another option for care along with the tourniquet may be packing and then wrapping the wound. The packing would be painful, but would help put pressure on the internal injuries that she's sustained as well, though depending on what your character carries along with her, she may not have anything clean enough to not risk infection for.

There's a lot of ways to go about this, you might even considering introducing a new character for her to come along to or to have come along her in this predicament to give an extra set of hands (and a potential future ally).

Answer 2

Congratulations on writing your own book! It's a fun endeavor and I hope it gives you hours of fulfillment! Sounds like an exciting tale, but having a seamstress as your closest medical aide sounds perfect and yet conflict driven. It's great, you're on the right path.

She knows better than to just take it out in the moment but when you get to a hospital in modern times, they eventually have to take it out and even medieval guys weren't walking around with big poles in their shoulders and legs. You've got so much ammo for a great, quiet and yet tense scene between those three characters. You might want to dig into those movie scenes where bullets have to be taken out without hospital care for the coping with pain on the road part. Most times these scenes include drinking some sort of numbing of the senses drink, biting down on a stick or something, or some other screaming or breathing technique. Then one person pulls the stake and the other has to hold them down. Then just stop the bleeding and sew it back up. Oh, tourniquet, that's how they slow the bleeding enough to sew it back up sometimes in these dramatic scenes. A tourniquet, great vocab word btw, is when you tie off the limb higher than the injury to slow the blood from flowing so quickly to the injury.

But you're writing a novel not a medical manual, so it doesn't have to have tons of detail or be incredibly accurate. A lot of authors are advising each other to do the research later and write what you know at the moment, making a note for yourself to research more later. Good luck with your novel writing!