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Spring cleaning? Avoid a trip to the ER during home improvements

Chris Enn
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Flickr

Spring time means a return to the outdoors and spring cleaning. Unfortunately, spring cleaning or other home improvement projects sometimes result in trips to the emergency room or even death.

This week on “Take Care,” hosts Linda Lowen and Lorraine Rapp discuss home improvement injuries with Dr. Ryan Stanton. Stanton is an emergency physician at Baptist Health in Lexington, Kentucky.

Stanton says he sees a lot of people come to the hospital from injuries they receive from home improvement and yard work activities.

“Getting into the warmer weather and into spring is like trying to get a bunch of couch potatoes up off and tell them to run a marathon,” Stanton says. “It’s just asking for trouble, and for us, the emergency room the spring is always a time when we get this he influx of patients coming in.”

Stanton says the most common injuries he sees in the emergency room related to house work are falls, cuts and lacerations from tools, back injuries and poison ingestions.

Falls are the leading thing he sees and they are results from falling off ladders, roofs and even stools.

Stanton says there are many factors that go into how bad someone could get hurt from falls. These include most importantly, how far a person falls and what kind of surface they fall onto. In addition, it depends on the person who is falling, if they are young and healthy or more elderly, possibly with osteoporosis. Lastly, there is how a person falls, as Stanton says “people don’t fall in a controlled fashion. That’s a jump.”  People who fall head first are more at risk for a serious injury than someone who lands on their leg, for instance. Still, Stanton says he’s seen many surprises in his time.

“I’ve seen people in the emergency room that have fallen 30 feet off a roof and have basically walked away from it,” Stanton says. “And I’ve seen people fall in the bathroom off their toilet and have had serious, life-threatening injuries.”

In terms of cuts and lacerations, Stanton says a good number of these come from lawnmower injuries. Everything from push lawn mowers to hedge trimmers to weed eaters, Stanton says each one is more than capable of cutting through human flesh. It’s not only the operator however. He states that pets and children should not be in the area while the lawn is being mowed. Objects such as rocks can easily get caught in the blades and thrown at high speeds to the nearby area.

According to Stanton, if anyone is injured from a lawnmower or other sharp object and are in transport to emergency services, the two keys are going to be pressure and elevation. Keeping the area that’s cut above the level of the heart will decrease bleeding. Putting pressure and keeping the pressure on can reduce the bleeding.

“One of the mistakes a lot of people make is they want to keep checking it to see if it’s stopped bleeding,” Stanton says. “Well, it doesn’t matter if it’s stopped bleeding. If you’re going to the doctor or the hospital, just leave the pressure on there because if you remove it to check it, there’s a good chance you’re going to remove that initial clot that we caught that’s in there that’s going to stop it and restart the bleeding.”

When it comes to back injuries, Stanton says anyone over the age of 25 or 30 will most likely experience some kind of normal back pain during home projects if they work all day. But if certain symptoms occur from an injury where the back in involved, more precautions need to be taken when considering treatment because it might be an injury where the spinal chord is compromised.

If a person has numbness symptoms similar to a stroke or dysfunction of the urinary system, Stanton says doctors may only have a matter of hours to fix that problem before it results in serious injury or death. For a sudden onset with minor problems, over-the-counter medicines are available but even then, Stanton says it wouldn’t hurt to check it out.

Poison ingestions can be one of the overlooked injuries when it comes to home improvement, but Stanton says it comes in abundance, especially this time of year.

“If you think about what you’re trying to do to to get ready for the spring, that may involve a lot of fertilizers, a lot of paint, a lot of different varnishes, chemicals for the garden, pesticides, those sorts of things.  And all of those can be a potential risk,” Stanton says.

Stanton says all it takes is the container of one of these chemicals to be placed on the floor unsupervised and a pet or child to pick it up to cause al big problem.

All of these potential threats are preventable with a little precautionary behavior when it comes time for home improvement.