Dopamine_Junkie

Ummm no. When you are an airline buying millions of gallons pumped right to your planes you see significant cost savings and lower fares result. Fuel delivery costs do not go down for small airports or DZ's that run their own little strip. I have no idea where you got that idea. Owning a plane is not cheap and each plane you own can only do so many jump runs a day even flying aggressively. Safety still matters. In off months the best DZ around here is only open Fri Sat Sun. Don't think they will be dropping prices.

It has. Southwest airlines had a 500 million dollar profit this quarter due to low prices. Isn't Jet-A just kerosene? That costs less to refine than gasoline. I'm not a refinery expert but someone explained to be at one time the difference in all the fuels and how they are refined. Out at DFW airport the fuel comes in to huge underground facilities for storage and then pumped out to the airport right to where the planes are parked. No more need for fuel trucks. DZ operators don't have that convenience for sure and you are right, it costs more to have it delivered by truck in much smaller quantities. When prices are this low, airlines like Southwest lay out significant money to buy all the fuel they can plus future fuel to be delivered later.

The way I see it is that is is an opportunity for a DZ owner to make a little more profit, hopefully to put aside for a rainy day or whatever they feel like. It's weird to me how people expect smalll businesses to give them a discount for any number of reasons, yet you don't ask for a discount in WalMart. Small business owners really get crapped on. The only way I see them dropping prices like the airlines have is to attract new jumpers or get the regulars to buy more jumps. You would need to sell a lot more jump tickets to realize better profits though. January isn't exactly the peak jumping time here, it has been cold and raining off and one for weeks.

Nice they need more locations for such a populated area. I lived maybe 2 or 3 minutes from the one in Frisco that opened not long ago. Haven't had a chance to go yet but it is great to have a tunnel so close.

Well, medics never got paid $12 bucks an hour anywhere I worked. I made $27 an hour when I first started. The last 5 years I was a medic in the field I was a flight paramedic and made substantially more. If you read my posts you would see where I said I am an ICU nurse and I also work in the ER when I get floated, due to my experience. Imagine that. I make even more now. I work in a level 1 trauma center in one of the biggest cities in this country so I have the experience to back up what I said. If you can't find the research it is because you are not looking in the right place. The thing I don't think you get is the last step for FDA approval of anything is testing it on humans, in the field in the case of emergency medical equipment. For instance, I used the King Airway in the field for at least a year before it was approved for use in the US. And look, I won't put up with your little backhanded comments, such as the $12 an hour bullshit insult about paramedics. I am a licensed paramedic in my state and that requires a 4 year degree for a reason. It only took 2 years to bridge to RN and get my BSN so why not do it. It's a lot more money and a lot safer. And it lead to me starting CRNA school this fall. Call me an idiot to my face over a trivial discussion about first aid and you are going to get bitch slapped. So you can question what I said all you like thinking that googling for research somehow overrides the real life experience of people in the medical field. Sometimes I work through an agency at a very well respected research hospital. I think you would be surprised at how much goes on there that hasn't been published yet because they are still doing research and collecting data. You can try to dismiss what those of us that actually work in the medical field have been exposed to, but you aren't right. And that seems to be what this is really about. You have some childish need to be "right" constantly. I bet you are a real pleasure to deal with in real life. It really blows my mind that you think you are an expert on the subject of gunshot wounds yet you are absolutely clueless as to why you would want to use a product like XSTAT on a wound in the groin or armpit. I mean there are just major vessels that run through those areas and you can bleed out in minutes. There is not a good reason to use it on the core of the body. Why? Well you aren't going to stick it in the chest where the lungs are. That has an entirely different treatment of placing an occlusive dressing to reinflate the lung. If you develop a tension pneumo with that dressing in place you just release one side and you have a nice flutter valve. Or you can decompress the chest with a needle if there is no wound in the case of blunt force trauma. You get a nice new chest tube when you hit the ER. You aren't going to stick it in the major vessels of the core anyway for reasons that should be obvious to anyone with any medical training. You get hit dead center chest you are dead. Hit in the heart is fatal. Hit in the aorta, fatal. You arent going to stick it in the abdomen because it's a cavity that just fills up with blood. There is not any tissue that could adequately hold the material in this device in place and create pressure as it expands. And guess who the first people where that used XSTAT. The military. And you probably won't find any peer reviewed papers about anything the military does that is otherwise unapproved for the civilian population. So you keep looking for research so that you can tell everyone how right you are while we are wrong even though we use these items. I know in nursing our theory changes when direct observation of patients dictates that we make a change in the best interest of all patients. We will keep saving lives in the field and in hospitals with devices that you want to argue about on a skydiving forum. FFS. http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm475810.htm http://www.emsworld.com/press_release/12147852/revmedx-announces-fda-clearance-for-xstat-for-use-on-civilian-population And by the way snopes says you are wrong about tampon use in the military. It may not be used today, but it has been used in the past. I agree it is a bad idea, but you can't argue with medics and soldiers that actually used them in combat. You could us a pad alone to put pressure on a wound if you had nothing else. http://www.snopes.com/military/tampon.asp Tampons have been used by U.S. Army medics as emergency wound care dressings: True. It's funny that you think you are "authoritatively" stamping down "misinformation" when you are completely and absolutely wrong. Just imagine you are a Marine patrolling the hellhole that Afghanistan is and you get shot. You might have a medic close by with an XSTAT that saves you from bleeding out waiting on the medivac. Or you may not have a medic anywhere near you. Without a doubt I would stick a tampon in the wound if I had one instead of just deciding to bleed to death waiting for help. Edited for spelling.

We carry basically that on ambulances. Big "trauma pads" that are just sterile absorbant pads to put pressure on the wounds. Things may have changed in the 3 years since I went to nursing so I can only speak from my past 21 years of experience as a medic. Over that time things changed rapidly and constantly, the reason we have continuing education requirements. As for the person above you, I understand the scientific method and peer reviewed articles. After all I have Cell and Molecular Biology and Biochemistry degrees on top of the rest of my education. Were you in the US military and were you a medic? I work with several nurses that were army medics and navy corpman. You would be surprised at what they use in the field that is basically experimental. A significant portion of what paramedics use in the field today came from the military and their research because they deal with trauma like gunshot wounds on a regular basis. I could go several months without a GSW just because calls are random. We did not place anything in a wound forever. Then we tried some quick clot type interventions but the surgeons didn't approve because they have to dig it out of the wound trying to repair a bleed. Anyway, you keep steering this thread way off topic. None of this matters for a first aid class for people with no medical training. I mean do people get shot a lot at your DZ or something? This seems to be a case of you being insitent you are right because you searched for peer reviewed data. That's fine with me, I don't care. Go back to the topic.

A lay person just might stick it anywhere on the arm or leg. My point was put it as close as you can. Sorry I am used to charting and I have to make it clear EXACTLY where I placed it because in court if it's not in the chart, you either didn't do it or can't prove you did it right.

Yeah tourniquets are a popular topic in emergency medicine. If the limb is gone I understand. I would place place it proximal to the amputation to save as much leg or arm as possible. You can use a BP cuff and pump the shit out of it. Much better than using a wire or band since it is wider. In rural areas call 911 and tell them you want a helicopter now and explain why. I started out as a 911 dispatcher decades ago and if you told me traumatic amputation, I would just dispatch the helicopter with the ambulance. Rural areas are often volunteer based and have extended response time. As for the leg straps. I don't find that to be terrible advice either way really. When I first became a paramedic we carried MAST pants on the ambulance. They are velcro "pants" you can slide on to a trauma victim and inflate the bladders to push blood to their core and to their brain saving the vital organs. The problem you will encounter with leg staps in place is the same as we encountered with MAST pants and we had to stop using them. When you get to the hospital the first thing they do is strip you naked and start assessing you. If you deflate the pants all at once, the systemic BP drops and guess what. Cardiac arrest ensues. Or some idiot cuts them with scissors and they deflate. I have worked in 3 different EMS systems and they all have different equipment and rules. Some are much more progressive than others. So it's hard to reach a consensus. Instead of cutting off blood flow to the legs you can elevate them. Trendelenburg position, legs elevated is thought to work well but again i get mixed reviews from other RN's. My best advice is if it's a skydiving accident make it clear to the 911 operator how serious the situation is. Some will just send the helicopter immediately and if your friend is hurt badly but still alive that can make all the difference in the world. The Golden Hour is still the rule all these years later. One hour from scene to the surgeon's knife. Edit - Yeah they really did use tampons in the military for bullet wounds. Then they went to quick clot. Now they are back to a device that packs a wound with expanding cotton that looks kinda like a tube with little marshmallows in it. (I just realized that is XSTAT, I didn't know the name. The FDA just cleared it for use in humans in the US and it is not in use around here just yet). I bet that pisses off surgeons a bunch, but apparently it works very well. Bullet wounds don't always bleed a lot. If they do it is mostly internal so direct pressure on them has little effect in my experience. You need something sterile in the wound to stop it.

I was about to make the same comment. A lay person should never, ever, ever apply any kind of a tourniquet. I have been a aparamedic for 21 years and an ER nurse in a level 1 trauma center for 3 years as well. I've never applied or seen a tourniquet applied to anyone. Direct pressure. As hard as you can. Be careful not to damage the ends of vessels unless you really want to piss off a vascular surgeon in the process. For this kind of activity it's important to not move people around too much. Don't pull helmets off unless you don't have an airway. If you need to do CPR that is fair game. Life comes before all else. CPR is easy. All you need to do is chest compressions. No need to do rescue breath unless you actually know how. Which is hard to do and try to protect the C-Spine as much as you can. The biggest two things for me is call 911 immediately and move them as little as possible. If the person needs CPR from blunt force trauma, don't feel bad if it doesn't work. Blunt force cardiac arrest is fatal maybe 8 or 9 times out of ten. Ripped aortas, pneumothorax, hemothorax, etc... You could have a doctor right there and they couldn't save them. Which sucks terribly when it is your buddy, I know how that goes. Edit - Tourniquets fell out of favor where I am a long time ago due to short transport times. The military does many, many things in the field that are not common in EMS systems yet because they can have some seriously long transport times even with a helicopter. I've seen a few traumatic amputations and we will clip off the vessels with sterile clamps if there is no hope of reattachment. Hopefully you never see that at a DZ ;)

Paypal alone can be dangerous for either party and charges can be reversed after getting the item. Use an escrow service. Paypal will also charge a fee, which can be quite large if the item is expensive. You should send the money as a gift to avoid that if you use Paypal, but the may say no if it is country to country. I have moved more than 100k through paypal in the last 2 years and the fees can suck and people have tried to screw me by reversing transactions.

I used to be 320 and got down under 250 and there was still only one DZ in Texas that accommodates that and everything is bigger in Texas as they say. Spaceland does tandems up to 280 if you are over 6 feet and their AFF limit is 250. If you can't meet that, you should probably try to lose some weight. There is maybe one parachute you can fly that isn't a tandem and that's a 300 Navigator. Not sure about other brands. It's no fun falling fast and jumping alone. Use it as an excuse to lose weight. I was well under the 225 then had back surgery, got lazy, and got fat. Best excuse ever to lose some weight and get back in shape.

That last part is a little confusing. You are Type 1 but you had your pilot's license before you became diabetic??? Type 1 is juvenile onset and almost always shows up way before you could obtain a pilot's license. If you became diabetic later in life you are Type 2.

Exact same here. 7 years out I am having some pain issues, especially in my tailbone for some reason. Got some epidurals and a ganglion block and am fine for now.

I only agree with him on one point. If the instructors are avoiding him, and it's not because he is an asshole but the jump just pays less, then the DZ needs to rectify that. He entered in a paid contract up front with them and they failed to provide him with the jumps and instructors as agreed to. If they want him to leave, they need to refund the part of the money he paid up front for those jumps. That is a shitty way to do business and word spreads fast on the internet. I actually drove 4 hours to a different DZ rather than go to one an hour from home. Why? They had a reputation for this exact bullshit. Willing to take your money, don't care if it takes a year to certify you.

I don't know you, but reading your story makes me think of a saying from the show Justified. "If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole." -Raylan Givens. Take it for what you will. You make it sound as if you are surrounded by assholes at every DZ, and I find that impossible. Maybe you need to do better research on this site and go to a top rated DZ. That's the point of this site after all. Also your AFF training doesn't sound right at all. 23 jumps and not ONE was coached? What are you doing? Static line only? At 23 jumps you should only be 2 to 3 jumps from an A. I don't get the issue here at all.