Mock Disaster Fall 2015 (Graphic)

All 4 of the models in full makeup. I was only responsible for the model on the far right.

This was the most intense mock disaster I have ever participated in. The local hospital asked our department if we would help do the makeup for their doctors' and nurses' trauma training, and gave us a huge packet with detailed outlines of the 4 victims they wanted. It listed in great detail all that was wrong with them and what the injuries looked like.

I was stoked! Disaster Day is my favorite day.

We each chose one 'victim' to work on and design and had a week or 2 to do all the research and plan out what we were going to do. I chose a car accident victim who hit a telephone pole so hard that it broke her seat-belt and she flew out the windshield about 20 feet (almost 7 meters). Her injuries consisted of bruising from the seat-belt, contused kidneys, a collapsed lung, broken nose, shock, cracked and broken ribs, dislocated hip, and then of course the secondary wounds like cuts and scrapes and glass in the wounds.

I did as much reading as I could before hand and tried to find pictures of all of these things, but it's extremely difficult to find actual pictures of wounded humans on the web, so after I had exhausted my other resources, I called my paramedic friend who told me what all of these wounds and inuries would look like and what colors they'd be (I really just wanted to get the coloring right since that was our biggest tool for recreating internal injuries, which most of my victim's injuries consisted of). I could not recreate a couple of the injuries listed in the packet in the time we were given, if at all, because they're internal injuries you can't recreate with makeup (I'd go into greater detail, but it's pretty graphic. Suffice it to know that organs were out of place), so I really had to rely on getting the coloring right so that the doctors would pick up on these injuries.

On the day of, we were given 3 hours to do all of the makeup and have the actors ready to go down to the hospital. I went to town and had so much fun participating in this mock disaster. To date, it has been my favorite mock disaster that I've participated in.

All in good fun.

When we had finished, the models were picked up and driven to the hospital where they spent the next 4 hours basically pretending to die.

We didn't know who our models were going to be, but I was super happy when my model came in because she's actually a good friend of mine. After the event, she told me that a lot of the doctors and medical personal thought that her injuries were real because the coloring and details looked incredibly realistic. Many of my friends on Facebook are in the medical profession, and when I posted these there they were able to look at the pictures and list almost everything that was wrong with her. It was one of the proudest moments of my life. I just really like Disaster Day.

-MD