You can’t be a SuperPrepperSurvivalistNinja™ (SPSN) if you have a broken leg.
I gotta be honest, it’s kinda hard just being a guy who gets up, does his morning routine, hops in a car and drives to the office for a day of desk work.
Actual prepper broken ankle.
We Need To Prep For A Broken Leg
First, let’s talk about the idea that many people have that they are, indeed a SuperPrepperSurvivalistNinja™ or, if not that, than at least a Super Survivalist.
I’ve got to be honest, hearing some people talk about their prepping skills makes me think of the movie Napoleon Dynamite, where Napoleon talks about skills: “I don’t even have any good skills. You know like nun chuck skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills. Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills!”
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against a person who has mad nun chuck skills or bow hunting skills… but here’s what I know… a SPSN with a broken leg is like a bird with a broken wing… he or she isn’t flying anywhere.
We’ve been talking about things you can prepare for to help get you by if somebody in your party/group breaks a leg and medical care / supplies are not available.
Let’s take it the next step further and look at longer term recovery
First, let’s assume we are not talking about a compound fracture… a break where the bone comes through the skin. Those are really, REALLY hard for a prepper to deal with, and are outside of the scope of this article.
When a break happens, and there is no medical help available, whomever the lead medic in the prepping group is going to have to deal with the break… Set the bone (if you know how to do that) and splint it up.
For a leg bone, doing this without modern medicine and medical training means there’s a very good chance that the person with the broken leg will be moderately to severely impaired for the rest of their lives (or until a surgeon can operate on the area and fix it the right way.
Physical therapy won’t likely be available either, so the patient is going to be on his or her own when it comes to recovery.
Sounds pretty “iffy”, doesn’t it.
An unfortunate amount of experience with leg injuries
Your blog post author has, unfortunately, had a wide variety of experience with leg injuries, including two extremely severe issues.
Issue one, a completely torn patella tendon… frankly, if modern medicine were not available within a week of when I tore this tendon, I would have been lame for life. It’s that simple, there’s no other way around it. As it was, it was a difficult repair that has limited my mobility some since.
Even with the repair, I was unable to bend my knee past 15 degrees for six months. I couldn’t put ANY weight on the leg for six months as well.
I’ve had several knee scopes for this and that, none of those were nearly as bad as the tendon or this new break.
With this break, I am basically (after surgery) off the leg entirely for six weeks. Without the surgery, the main bone would have grown back but the fragments on the other side of the ankle that broke off would have forever been an issue, as would stability of that ankle.
This type of injury will be more common if the SHTF than now, not less
If the Stuff Hits The Fan (SHTF) we are all going to be doing a lot of things that we don’t normally do daily, and this is going to lead to a LOT of injuries, whether those be cuts, strains or breaks.A
The people most likely to get hurt are those who spend their time “at the tip of the spear” where the most danger is.
That’s why I keep coming back to the SPSN types, the guys (it’s always guys who are SPSN) who believe they can do nearly anything survival related. If we depend upon these people’s skills to get us by, when they get injured or killed, then we are in a real world of hurt.
One person’s broken leg can kill a whole group
If one person is irreplaceable for 6 weeks, and that person gets injured in a way that makes them immobile (or close enough to it that it doesn’t matter) with a broken leg or some other injury, then people will die because of it.
That makes across-your-group skill sharing and workload sharing a hugely important survival tool to combat injury.
Additionally, if one person is down with a broken leg, that also means that there’s a whole lot less room for error in survival for everybody else. With one main person out of action, everybody else needs to pull back and be more conservative.
Here’s a non-SHTF example of what I am talking about. Spice is involved in a very risky sport, one that has a significant chance of injury of exactly the type I suffered… a broken fibula and related damage. During the time when I am a mono pod (one-legged) she has suspended participating in her sport, because we don’t want to risk both of us being out of action at the same time.
Conclusion
Every prepper needs a plan for how to deal with a broken leg and other mobility issues. It’s a big deal, because if the SHTF right now, I’d be in real trouble…. and I already do have the plans, tools, devices and supplies (and a wife who knows how to use them to assist me).