Bikers urged to stay safe in hot weather
ALEADING specialist in burns injuries is urging motorcyclists and their passengers to wear full protective gear, after seeing some gruesome, life-changing injuries during the heatwave.
Consultant Hywel Dafydd, who works at the Welsh Centre for Burns and Plastic Surgery at Morriston Hospital in Swansea, said riders are putting their lives in their own hands by only wearing T-shirts and shorts.
Speaking on BBC’s Crimewatch Roadshow, Mr Dafydd, who ground gravel into a piece of pork to demonstrate the type of injuries suffered by riders and passengers, said: “It’s simple physics – the soft and wobbly human body versus the hard gravelly road surface.
“Essentially what you get is an ‘abrasion’ – so, a scrape – a bit like the graze you might get on your knee if you fell over running.
“But going over 30mph the degree of tissue damage and contamination is many, many times worse, sometimes bone-deep.
“It can cause lifelong scarring, and it damages everything between – your muscles, tendons and nerves.
“At higher speeds, things gets even worse. Soft tissues aren’t just scraped away, but are also avulsed (so, literally ripped off in chunks).
“Or even degloved, where the skin and muscles, although still there, have been torn away from their underlying blood supply so will die.
“As a general rule of thumb, if your skin hits the road at speed, you’ll lose around a millimetre of flesh for every mile per hour above 30 you’re travelling.
“So at 70mph you lose around 4cms of flesh. Where your soft tissue is particularly thin – so on your ankles, elbows, wrists and face – even abrasions can end up going into bone or joint, and can mean amputation of body parts.”
A 42-year-old from Cardiff, who wished not to be named, was on a friend’s bike when he came off on to a gravel track.
The man, who admitted to only wearing a vest and shorts, is now being treated at the burns centre and has urged others not to repeat his “stupid” mistake.
“Take time and put your protective clothes on. It could save your life,” he said.
He was celebrating his birthday that day, and had just returned home from work when his friend arrived.
“I hopped on thinking ‘it’ll be a fiveminute ride to cool me down.’
“I didn’t put a helmet on, no safety gear, nothing. I had flip flops on, shorts and a vest.”
A few minutes later he fell while the bike made its way down a gravel track, rolling over and over after he hit the ground. His friend remained seated on the bike and brought it to a halt.
Too badly injured to ride back but with the adrenaline keeping him going, he managed to walk the short distance home, despite blood gushing from a head wound and vast abrasions to his buttocks, both legs and both arms.
Upstairs at home he got undressed and went into shock.
His girlfriend called an ambulance and he was admitted to the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff before being transferred to Swansea, where, he said, the staff have been “a Godsend”.
In all he suffered a broken left hand, a head wound and extensive abrasions to both arms, legs and his buttocks.
He said: “My left buttock is gone completely. My shorts disintegrated. They (medical staff ) thought it was really bad gravel in my wounds and when they started cleaning them out they realised it was my shorts.”
His wounds had to be cleaned in theatre under local anaesthetic and he has also been given oral morphine to help him cope with the pain.
Now unable to move out of bed, he will have to wait until his dressings are changed again to find out how long he will remain in hospital and what further treatment he requires.
Mr Dafydd added that a protective jacket, trousers and gloves will not protect a rider from all serious injuries, but rarely will they end up with large areas of soft tissue loss.
So if the rider is unlucky and takes a tumble, the protection offered by dressing safely will make it easier for broken bones to heal and the patient’s recovery will be faster.