Ice injury: advice from a traumatologist

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Ice injury is most often associated with the fact that people do not know how to group or choose shoes that are not suitable for the weather, says traumatologist Ivan Razuvanov. After what fall is it definitely worth checking in the hospital?

- Ice injury is, as a rule, a fall from a height of a person's height due to loss of balance on a slippery surface.

This may be due to the choice of winter shoes - without ribbed soles or "winter" patterns on them, with high heels. Also, injuries occur due to inattention, when a person does not look where he steps. When falling, they often do not know how to group: instead, they reflexively throw their hand to the side, trying to lean on it, fall backward and hit the back of the head. And this is the most unsafe! You need to protect your head with your hands, and ideally, press your hands to your body and fall on your side.

Ice injury is usually associated with damage to the arms, legs, head, or coccyx with the spine. When falling on handhand, wrist, elbow and forearm are affected. There are a number of typical injuries: a fracture of the radius in a typical location, damage to the bones of the wrist, forearm and hand, fractures of the bones that form the elbow and shoulder joints.

On the footinjuries to the ankle (often damage to the ankles), knee (damage to the ligaments, menisci, and even fractures in the area of the bones that form the knee joint). The hip joint can also be affected, especially in people over 60. Due to the fragility of the bones, they seriously risk getting a fracture of the upper end of the femur, femoral neck, etc.

Dangerous falls and head bangs … Often a person did not have time to group and fell backward - hit the back of his head. There can be both simple bruises and serious damage to the bones of the skull and various intracranial injuries that may even require surgical intervention. Such falls can damage the cervical spine.

Damage coccyx and lower lumbar vertebraeassociated with a fall "to the fifth point." And it can lead to fractures and bruises, which are accompanied by severe pain. Overweight people with uncertain gait due to any disease may even have fractures of the lumbar vertebrae.

How to assess your condition?

If you fall, in no case should you stand up suddenly. First, assess the situation, feel what hurts. If there is pain in a leg or arm, you should try slowly moving your fingers or a joint close to the source of the pain. If there is no particular pain, you feel fine - you can quietly get up and then check whether you can move your whole arm, fully step on your foot, etc. If so, you can get home.

If the pain is acute, you cannot feel a leg or arm while lying down, you cannot move a limb - call for help from passers-by, call an ambulance and, again, do not try to get up suddenly. Keep in mind that not just any hospital is suitable for you - but one that provides the right profile: at the very least, you need an X-ray to assess the condition.

Head injury is a separate topic: if you hit the back of your head, it is better to go to the hospital and have an examination. The bruising will go away, but intracranial injuries can be missed: both a concussion and skull fractures, if, for example, you hit a curb abruptly. Immediately you may not feel anything (we call it the "light gap"), but after a while you will lose consciousness and the state may become critical.

How to be treated at home?

With minor pain manifestations after a fall, there may be a self-diagnosis period - a day or two, spent at home. Upon returning home, you can take off your clothes and assess the external condition: the presence of bruises is normal if the limbs move without acute pain. At home, you can apply cold to the place of injury - a leg or an arm - or make a tight or kerchief (for the hand) bandage. Provide the limbs for a while at rest.

But if the pain does not go away, it intensifies - you must not delay the examination of the doctor.

It is important to pay attention to children: they have so-called childhood fractures, in which growth zones are broken with the participation of cartilaginous structures, they can hardly show themselves in any way - it hurts and hurts, and then after a few days it turns out that the child walked with a fracture.