It started with my tire blowing out. I was driving, and then there was a big, GIGANTIC *THUMP* where the closest thing I can compare it to is as if I had hit a curb. I hadn't, quite positive of that, but that's the closest experience I can think of. The whole car slowed a little, shook, the whole works. Like an explosion going off. From the tire popping.

I wasn't immediately sure what happened, but when I kept noticing that the car wasn't handling properly (drifting to the right), it wasn't that hard to figure out. Fortunately, I was very very close to my destination anyway, so I kept going until I got there and then phoned for help. (Repeatedly.)

Then came work; nothing interesting there beyond the norm, but it did eat up the vast majority of my day. I got home only like two hours ago. And that means that, obviously, today's not been a productive day. Kinda hard to be productive with so little spare time. OH WELL. There's always tomorrow!

I got almost caught up in everything.
Almost.
There's still a few things I need to get caught up on.
But I did most of it.
And, as a bonus, I ended the night with a date!

Said date means no real blog, mind you but OH WELL WORTH IT.

And I spent it half trying to catch up on things (still...so...behind...) and half wasting on doing literally nothing of consequence. OH WELL.

So no blog entry today, sorry.

...But I had a date with my girlfriend.
Date with my girlfriend > need to catch up on stuff. The stuff I need to catch up on, while I bitch and moan about it, is mostly trivial. It's not all trivial, some of it's important, I can't slack off indefinitely, I do have some amount of responsibility for these sorts of things, but by and large while I do want to catch up, honestly, it can wait whenever I have a date. I'll probably be fully caught up by the weekend, on most stuff, anyway.

My GOD I do not have enough time in my day to get caught up.
I've got like dozens of videos to watch.
League has a bunch of challenges to do which require playing a ton of games.
I'm behind in my duties elsewhere in spite of my work there.
I've probably forgotten all the things I need to do, just because there are so many of them.
There's just not enough time.

Mind you, that's not why I'm not blogging; I'm not blogging because I'm a moron. But I've just got...so, so much to do, and so little time to do it in.

And by GOD I've got so...much...to...do......so...behind...in everything...

And I am going to be in hell because I am sick​. Hoh boy am I sick.

I had a really, really, really lengthy blog planned for today. As much about family stuff as I could think of (the guy who fell is fine, by the way, thankfully enough), but also a lengthy blog about a couple of things I've been toying around with. As a reminder, we leave tomorrow. We're supposed to be gone by 10 local time (which is 8 my time), which means being clear before then which means eating breakfast, packing, and leaving before then. Probably in six or so hours by my guess.

I wanted to stay up for like four of said hours, so I thought I had the time to blog here--even when going on the best date with my girlfriend as is humanly possible given the circumstances (no sound available to me). But while I want to sleep as much as is humanly possible on the trip tomorrow...I'm not sure I can pull it off. I'm fighting off the urge to sleep as is, and have been since before midnight.

Kinda sucks. I feel like in spite of not having set my watch to local time (I've deliberately kept it at my time). In spite of going to bed after midnight my time (which is after 2 am local time) and waking up as late as was humanly practical. That somehow, in spite of me taking every precaution against it. My body has acclimated to the new timezone and is treating this as 2:45 instead of 12:45.

That, or being sick leads to tiredness and tiredness leads to continued sickness and sickness leads to more tiredness...

Butstill. I shouldn't be falling asleep so easily so early. And yet here I am, struggling to stay awake.

Oh well.

Won't get the blog I wanted to give and given my track record, doubt I ever will. But it's the thought which counts.

A common traveler pitfall. Normally, you'd associate said pitfall with flights; they are known to be the breeding ground of the perfect recipe of bacteria. Environment's right even if they sanitize everything...and they sanitize nothing. But most of those conditions? Still apply to traveling in a car across half the country in 28 hours' time continuously. So it should be no surprise that I am siiiiiiick.

Annoyingly enough. My vitamin C pill's one of the few pills I did not bring. It's a pill I don't take daily, but have at home to take whenever I suspect sickness, to help shorten the duration of it and the strength of it. Normally have it; today I do not. So the only treatment I have is time...and in this foreign environment, not the best of things there, either, considering we leave on Monday. 

All in all, socializing seems to be so-so at this event. I was miserable when I had to constantly run from the smokers, but later in the day that proved to be less of a problem. There was an incident at the gathering, though. One of the steel benches tipped over after a couple sat down on them...and they went down with the bench. The guy hit his back hard, as well as bumping his head on the back of another nearby bench.

I am trained to respond to spinals, even on land. This was a textbook spinal. But I felt powerless to help him. The extent of my training for spinals, after all, is pretty much "stabilize the spine, and wait for EMS to arrive for them to take over care". There's a little more to it than that, asking questions and whatnot, monitoring the patient, and so on and so forth, butstill. In practice, I didn't feel like I could do much.

After EMS came, he declined to go to the hospital eventually, but some time after they left, other family members there managed to talk him into it. A good thing, too, because while I can't diagnose him for certain...he was showing symptoms of something being wrong. Possibilities include having suffered from a heart attack (possible if the sudden impact caused a type of ventricular fibrillation), or more likely in my opinion, shock...a possible body response to internal bleeding (something an EMS responder might not notice but which they would probably see at the hospital).

When the injury happened, while he remained conscious, initially, he couldn't talk; his hands seemed to not be able to make full motion; he was incredibly shaky; he was sweating profusely; he later said that he was having trouble breathing. Like I said, my contribution was mostly minimal, in strongly recommending to go to the doctor, helping him out, monitoring him between the time EMS left and he was talked into going, the like, but I still feel like I should've been more decisive, more helpful, voiced my opinion on things to someone who could relay it on, something more than what little I did.

Ultimately, I know it doesn't matter much; he still ended up going to the hospital, there was a hospital less than five minutes away so I'm pretty sure he's got good treatment, there's probably nothing I could have done which would have helped him more than he got help especially given his initial stubbornness (he really didn't want to go to the hospital and my training basically tells me to respect patient's wishes so I am trained to not try and push them, more or less), but it still makes me feel kinda like a fraud.

I've got training in first aid. I've got training in how to deal with spinals, and deal with spinals at every staff meeting. (Speaking of which, there was one today that I couldn't attend for obvious reasons. I'm considering cheekily/half-jokingly telling my supervisors that in spite of not having been at the staff meeting I still got practice in spinals.) But if that training doesn't allow me to help someone when it's actually happening for real outside of training...it's kinda disheartening. 

I was asked afterwards since I was the closest one to the incident and saw it unfold start to finish if I was okay, the expected concern being that as a witness I'd be traumatized. The trauma isn't in the event having happened; I am trained for things like that happening. The trauma is in knowing I am trained and yet feeling like a bystander who is untrained. Which makes me feel like a failure, to be honest.