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- Gamer Uses Game Training to Save a Life
- Posted 7 months, 1 weeks ago by Sean
Last November, Paxton Galvanek of Silver Spring, MD, became a hero. He was driving westbound with his family along Interstate 40 in North Carolina, about 25 miles south of Raleigh, when he saw an eastbound SUV lose control and flip over about five times. While his wife called 911, he ran across the highway to the scene of the accident.
Not this SUV, but you get the idea...
He found two injured men inside of the smoking SUV. The man in the passenger seat was not seriously injured, and Mr. Galvanek told him to move away from the vehicle. Making his way to the driver's side, he realized that the driver of the SUV had not fared as well as the passenger. The driver had a head wound and had lost two fingers, and was bleeding profusely. Paxton wrapped a towel he found around the man's hand, applied pressure to the wound, and instructed the victim to hold his hand above his head. He then attended to the head cut and determined that injury was not as severe as the hand. About five minutes later, a plain clothes Army soldier arrived on the scene, informed Mr. Galvanek that he had medical training, and took over the triage and Mr. Galvanek left the scene and continued on his way.
Now, I'm sure that stories like this happen all the time (at least, I hope so...), but what makes this one stand out is that Paxton Galvanek never received any formal medical training. In fact the methods he used to help this crash victim were learned playing a video game, America's Army.
After the incident, Galvanek wrote the America's Army team to thank them for including the medical training in the game. He said, “I have received no prior medical training and can honestly say that because of the training and presentations within America's Army, I was able to help and possibly save the injured men. As I look back on the events of that day, the training that I received in the America's Army video game keeps coming to mind.”
As great as this story is, you know that no mainstream media will cover this. It's much easier to just parrot the Jack Thompson / Kevin McCullough line of games are violent, games are horrible, games can do no good.
It does my heart good to read things like this. Good on you, Mr. Galvanek.
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Comments
Mr. Galvanek is fairly lucky that the individuals didn't have c-spine injuries. I'm an ex-EMT, ex-soldier, and current AA gamer, and while it is a good thing for people to assist accident victims (who likely don't have the presence of mind to have common sense immediately following a collision), the rule should always be: minimize movement and activity unless it is absolutely necessary to prevent imminent death or serious injury (fires, massive bleeding, etc...). In this case it sounds like the latter was the case, but don't actually rely on AA medic training. Instead, consider volunteering with your local volunteer fire department and getting them to send you to First Responder and then EMT schools. If you are a soldier, then you know to add CLS to your training goals.
Did he learn first aid from a game, or is stopping bleeding by compression and elevation just plain common sense?
Is the world so sad that instead of learning the basics of life we are sitting on our fat asses and hopefully get lucky at learning something useful?
I just hope that the day I need to be rescued from an army of undead pre world war 2 Nazi experiment zombies with laser guided sharks shooting from their butts one of you house bound obese freaks will be there to apply a towel to my bleedy bits.
See gamers do good things because of games
Crappy game but nice story.
It would have been more exciting if he sliced a pentagram into the victims with his pocket knife and performed surgery on them while they were in the car.
Hell yeah, Trauma Center!
It's about time video games were used for something good.....LOL