You always feel it, but you don't have to fear it

So, pretty frequently writers screw up when they write about injuries. People are clonked over the head, pass out for hours, and wake up with just a headache… Eragon breaks his wrist and it’s just fine within days… Wounds heal with nary a scar, ever…

I’m aiming to fix that.

Here are over 100 links covering just about every facet of traumatic injuries (physical, psychological, long-term), focusing mainly on burns, concussions, fractures, and lacerations. Now you can beat up your characters properly!

General resources

WebMD

Mayo Clinic first aid

Mayo Clinic diseases

First Aid

PubMed: The source for biomedical literature

Diagrams: Veins (towards heart), arteries (away from heart) bones, nervous system, brain

Burns

General overview: Includes degrees

Burn severity: Including how to estimate body area affected

Burn treatment: 1st, 2nd, and 3rd degrees

Smoke inhalation

Smoke inhalation treatment

Chemical burns

Hot tar burns

Sunburns

Incisions and Lacerations

Essentials of skin laceration repair (including stitching techniques)

When to stitch (Journal article—Doctors apparently usually go by experience on this)

More about when to stitch (Simple guide for moms)

Basic wound treatment

Incision vs. laceration: Most of the time (including in medical literature) they’re used synonymously, but eh.

Types of lacerations: Page has links to some particularly graphic images—beware!

How to stop bleeding: 1, 2, 3

Puncture wounds: Including a bit about what sort of wounds are most likely to become infected

More about puncture wounds

Wound assessment: A huge amount of information, including what the color of the flesh indicates, different kinds of things that ooze from a wound, and so much more.

Home treatment of gunshot wound, also basics More about gunshot wounds, including medical procedures

Tourniquet use: Controversy around it, latest research

Location pain chart: Originally intended for tattoo pain, but pretty accurate for cuts

General note: Deeper=more serious. Elevate wounded limb so that gravity draws blood towards heart. Scalp wounds also bleed a lot but tend to be superficial. If it’s dirty, risk infection. If it hits the digestive system and you don’t die immediately, infection’ll probably kill you. Don’t forget the possibility of tetanus! If a wound is positioned such that movement would cause the wound to gape open (i.e. horizontally across the knee) it’s harder to keep it closed and may take longer for it to heal.

Broken bones

Types of fractures

Setting a broken bone when no doctor is available

Healing time of common fractures

Broken wrists

Broken ankles/feet

Fractured vertebrae: Neck (1, 2), back

Types of casts

Splints

Fracture complications

Broken noses

Broken digits: Fingers and toes

General notes: If it’s a compound fracture (bone poking through) good luck fixing it on your own. If the bone is in multiple pieces, surgery is necessary to fix it—probably can’t reduce (“set”) it from the outside. Older people heal more slowly. It’s possible for bones to “heal” crooked and cause long-term problems and joint pain. Consider damage to nearby nerves, muscle, and blood vessels.

Concussions

General overview

Types of concussions 1, 2

Concussion complications

Mild Brain Injuries: The next step up from most severe type of concussion, Grade 3

Post-concussion syndrome

Second impact syndrome: When a second blow delivered before recovering from the initial concussion has catastrophic effects. Apparently rare.

Recovering from a concussion

Symptoms: Scroll about halfway down the page for the most severe symptoms

Whiplash

General notes: If you pass out, even for a few seconds, it’s serious. If you have multiple concussions over a lifetime, they will be progressively more serious. Symptoms can linger for a long time.

Character reaction:

Shock (general)

Physical shock: 1, 2

Fight-or-flight response: 1, 2

Long-term emotional trauma: 1 (Includes symptoms), 2

First aid for emotional trauma

Treatment (drugs)

WebMD painkiller guide

Treatment (herbs)

1, 2, 3, 4

Miscellany

Snake bites: No, you don’t suck the venom out or apply tourniquettes

Frostbite

Frostbite treatment

Severe frostbite treatment

When frostbite sets in: A handy chart for how long your characters have outside at various temperatures and wind speeds before they get frostbitten

First aid myths: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Includes the ones about buttering burns and putting snow on frostbite.

Poisons: Why inducing vomiting is a bad idea

Poisonous plants

Dislocations: Symptoms 1, 2; treatment. General notes: Repeated dislocations of same joint may lead to permanent tissue damage and may cause or be symptomatic of weakened ligaments. Docs recommend against trying to reduce (put back) dislocated joint on your own, though information about how to do it is easily found online.

Muscular strains

Joint sprain

Resuscitation after near-drowning: 1, 2

Current CPR practices: We don’t do mouth-to-mouth anymore.

The DSM IV, for all your mental illness needs.

Electrical shock

Human response to electrical shock: Includes handy-dandy voltage chart

Length of contact needed at different voltages to cause injury

Evaluation protocol for electric shock injury

Neurological complications

Electrical and lightning injury

Cardiac complications

Delayed effects and a good general summary

Acquired savant syndrome: Brain injuries (including a lightning strike) triggering development of amazing artistic and other abilities

I just found out today that photographer Sarah Dunn was hit by a car in April and has suffered serious injuries.  She has taken some of fandom’s most favorite images of Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Aidan Turner, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston, and many other Tumblr loves.

Her husband has a Go Fund Me set up here. 

From her Instagram–

Photos you might know (all copyright Sarah Dunn)–

As a side note, I follow her on Instagram but found this out from ONTD because of @instagram‘s horrid timeline situation.  If they still used chronological timelines, I would have known so much sooner. 

“Bruises speak louder than words”

“Potential is in the eye of the whumper”

“Caregivers can’t be choosers”

“Better hurt than healthy”

“Torture favours the bold”

“Good whump comes to those who write it”

“If it ain’t broke, break it”

“If you can’t beat ‘em, stab ‘em”

“Pain makes perfect”

“The early viewer gets the whump”

“Like whumper, like whumpee”

“Creators killed the character, but whumpers brought them back”

“A whumpee saved is a trope earned”

“A botched plot never satisfies”

“An imagine a day keeps the canon away”

“An ounce of whump is worth a pound of filler”

“If they can’t stand the heat: icebath”

I love it!!!

“Happy the fan who whumps her man (character, of course)”

“An idle mind has time to imagine deliciously devious whump”

“Never put off til tomorrow what you can whump today”

This is the part they didn’t show you in The Final Problem.

That rope was for Sherlock to climb down into the well to John. John had been struggling to keep his head clear of the water for a good while, and he was getting exhausted; hypothermia starting to set in. It was going to be another 10 minutes or so before the police arrived to unchain John and get all of them out of there, but that could seem an endless and fatal time for a fatigued man barely able to get a gasp of air. 

Sherlock was quite a bit taller than John, so he took it upon himself to clamber down into the well and take on John’s weight so his friend could rest. How overwhelmed with relief he must be to be able to finally save his best friend from that cursed well. At this moment, it’s just the two of them, nothing else and no one else mattered.

“Sherlock,” John shouts. His voice hoarse and rasping, echos up that endless shaft above him, out into the small patch of night sky. He strains to hear a response. There is silence except for his own labored breaths, the low roar of the water pouring in and the slosh and slap of his arms flailing against the water that is closing around his neck, like algid fingers.

He felt weak even before the frigid water started pouring in. The drugs that had knocked him unconscious have not fully worn off and the chill of the water has numbed his muscles and sapped what little fight he had been managing to put on.

The metal bites into the flesh of his ankle as he jerks against the shackle anchoring him to the bottom. He can feel everything trembling as he tries to stay above the water. His lungs burn. His fingers scrabble against the slick stone wall, seeking some hold. The tips are bleeding, but that hardly matters.

He is going to die here.

“Sherlock.” His voice is so small; swallowed up in liquid darkness. He thinks of that smooth, black surface of Sherlock’s headstone. How he had placed his hand on it and bowed his head. How he had wept and felt like he was drowning and begged for Sherlock to come and save him… and he had come… but too late. John had already died inside. Had already buried his truths in a cold grave.

And now… when Sherlock comes - if Sherlock comes- it will be too late again.

His vision remains warped on the edges, like staring out of a fish bowl. That bleak irony is not lost on him. His weakened arms flail uselessly against the water. They are doing less and less to keep him buoyant. Exhaustion is quickly settling into every muscle and his legs have turned heavy, like stones, weighing him down.

“Please. Please, Sherlock,” he whispers. He touches the device nestled in his ear. It has been silent for far too long. Maybe Sherlock is hurt too. Maybe he can’t come. Maybe communication had been turned off because maybe, this time, Sherlock won’t try to save John - doesn’t want to. Always the bloody ‘damsel in distress’ and, just like in the prison when John had tried to warn Sherlock with ’Vatican Cameos’ and Sherlock chose to ignore him, maybe the time when Sherlock would trust words from John above all else had passed.

The panic swells in John’s chest along with the guilt, the shame, and the heartache. He knows that on some level he doesn’t deserve to be saved, yet again. Sherlock had saved him so many times and in so many ways and he had been downright vicious and cruel towards him. He had misdirected his grief and rage on the one person that had went through fire and hell for him time after time. And it had all been John’s attempt to kill his own feelings - to burn out his own heart so he could stop feeling. He really is an idiot.

John could never trust it. He had loved Mary… the Mary before the shooting… but that Mary wasn’t real… the woman playing the role of Mary, Rosamund, she had proven herself to be a very good actress. So he couldn’t tell what was the truth or the lie with her. It was all an illusion. They were all smiling and living a perfect (fake) life. He was playing along but there were so many lies.

The more he stayed with Mary and the more he tried to play the perfect part of husband and father, the more he realized what was missing. The woman on the bus… the woman he now knows to have been Eurus… reminded John of Sherlock in ways he hadn’t even been able to pinpoint at the time - just in the feeling she gave him. More so when she texted him… her smart, sharp and sometimes dark wit… He could almost pretend… that’s why he had texted her - kept texting her. It was wrong. He felt horrible and guilt-ridden… but with that light flirting he also had felt closer to happy than he had since before Sherlock jumped.

That day he texted Elizabeth (Eurus) that it was over, he had realized she was a stand-in for Sherlock. He realized he was never going to be happy with the illusion and that, even if he was terrified of being rejected by Sherlock again, he had to try. He had planned to tell Mary he couldn’t do it anymore. He had started to, there on the couch, before they got the text to come to the aquarium. Then, in the moment Mary had died in his arms he had been overwhelmed with grief, guilt, shame and anger because in that moment of deep anguish it all got twisted up inside him and it seemed that falling for Sherlock all those years ago cursed him to never be able to be the kind of man that could be worthy of all that praise Mary heaped on him in those final moments and all the kindness and self-sacrifice she’d shown in the end. Maybe she had been worthy of all of John’s love, but he had fallen for another long ago and he could not make himself fit that perfect image of happiness she had been trying to create for them both.

He had failed in so many ways.

Above all, he’d hated Sherlock for making him fall in love and then turning into a man that seemed capable of loving too late.

John yanks at his leg again, desperately. It isn’t suppose to end this way. Chained to the bottom of a well with the bones of a child beneath his feet. He thinks of calling out again, but it seems futile. There is no one to save him this time, and he only has himself to blame.

The last words John had heard through that device in his ear now echo through his mind. Sherlock’s voice; quiet and broken and raw with honesty, ‘I love you.’

It hadn’t been for John. Those words had been for Eurus, just as they had been offered up to Molly earlier. They’d never said those words to each other. They had come closest with Mary as a buffer of safety.

‘…I want to be up there with the two people I love most in the world,’ John had said when he asked Sherlock to be his Best Man.

‘…here you sit between the two people that love you most in the world,’ Sherlock had said in his Best Man speech.

That was as close as they could get - the brightness of their love dimmed into something manageable by reflecting it off another. They could not say it to each other directly because, as Molly confessed, saying it is too much when it is actually true. With Sherlock, it mattered. Saying it directly would change everything and that was always too scary a prospect. He was trying so hard to make it anyone but Sherlock, because Sherlock had already rejected him all those years ago and if he did again… that would be more than John could take. He wouldn’t risk it.

Now, as he strains on his tiptoes, his head tipped back, the water up around his chin, he thinks of those words from Sherlock being the last words he will ever hear. A warmth blooms in his cold, heaving chest.

(LONG long post. click on the title to go to the link)

SHERLOCK WHUMP:

The Breaking Wheel (J_Baillier) - The instant classic. Prolonged, nuanced medical angst. The best. (and the 7PercentSolution & J_Baillier sequel On the Rack  )

Lunar Landscapes (J_Baillier) - This author is a genius. And this work has practically every colour of Sherlock angst/whump that exists.

Fratros, Eros and Agape (emma221b) - John finds Sherlock bleeding in Magnusson’s office. What happens next (is glorious)

Harmless Things (J_Baillier) Scorpions do horrid things to Sherlock

All the Best and Brightest Creatures (wordstrings) - This is epic; and heartbreaking and beautiful. So beautiful….

My Will’s Not My Own (SailorChibi) - Read the warnings. This one broke my heart; oh Sherlock. It’s never his fault… 

The Dying Detective Remix (SailorChibi) - When will Sherlock EVER ask for help.

Whenever it’s right (Aliea) - John sees a beautiful man with green eyes on the train. And then the train explodes…

Electric Pink Hand Grenade (BeautifulFiction) - Everyone knows this one. The greatest brain in the world gets the world’s worst migraine…

Dangerous Mould (Benfan) - (Near) death via a petri dish

Raison d’etre (AmphigoricSymphony) - This is like the War and Peace of Sherlock whump. Bloody Mary…

Lopov (AmphigoricSymphony) - Mycroft saves a brutalised Sherlock in Serbia

Addicted to a Certain Lifestyle (sfmpco) - Another fill-in-the-gaps after Sherlock’s collapse at Baker Street during HLV.

Your Visible Ghost (anactoria) - Read the warnings. Sherlock goes missing and John receives a video message…

Staircase Wit (splix) - Sherlock just keeps getting beaten (up). And asphyxiated. Quite beautifully.

The way it was meant to be (whitchry9) - John leaves Sherlock for just four days. And of course; pneumonia.

Fever (thecommonplaceofexistence) - John leaves Sherlock again. Sherlock gets pneumonia. Again.

How to torture John (Dlvvanzor) - Read the warnings. Seriously. Read them. This is Sherlock whump but almost equally John.

The Yellow Poppies (SilentAuror) - Mary is a bad person. Sherlock suffers.

Rush (Valxyri) - Sherlock gets drugged with a massive overdose

In The Silence (ScopesMonkey) - A longer saga (Sugerverse) is worth the read but this section is quite angsty and Sherlock gets concussion. Chapters 3 – 5 esp.

A More Vicious Motivator (ShezzasCompanion) - Read the warnings. Sherlock returns from Serbia and well, things just go from bad to worse…

Perfectly Fine (cabintardlock) - Sherlock gets ill and like an idiot hides it from his doctor…

Pain Management (TheGracefulBlueCat**) - Missing scenes from HLV most about pain and angst and trauma. **So many of this author’s works are wonderful Sherlock / John whump which I am not going to list here but recommend…

The Game has Changed (youtextd) - Mycroft arrives in Serbia too late to save Sherlock from terrible, long-lasting trauma. This is the story of how John and Mycroft help Sherlock back.

Not the King’s Men (StoneWingedAngel) - Oh god. Sherlock :-( this is as far as you can go before Sherlock is too traumatised to recover…

Getting Over It (The_Cool_Aunt) - Something’s not quite right with Sherlock. John starts to notice…

Finger Painting in the Dark (whitchry9) - Read the warnings. Moriarty gets his hands on Sherlock and well… it doesn’t go well. At all.

Tears of the Violinist (SUPRNTRAL LVR) - Moriarty steals Sherlock again. It’s brutal.

Cleansing (CumberbatchCritter) - John stumbles across Sherlock detoxing after being in hospital for so long. It’s a painful process.

Confessions (hockeylass) - John and Sherlock hit the road on a case; and then everything goes to hell.

Not Quite in his Right Mind (BakerTumblings) - Sherlock gets a head injury and it’s a shock for John…

No Incentive So Great (thisprettywren) - Sherlock argues with John. And then gets kidnapped. John is awesome.

The Fix (peg22) - Sherlock goes out for milk. And is injected with heroin.

Blind-Spot in Your Intellect (Only_1_Truth) - Sherlock tests a drug on a military-trained flatmate with PTSD…

The Emergency Contact series (blueink3) - Who Sherlock has as his Emergency Contact when he gets hurt, changes over time…

 *******

JOHN WHUMP:

And a Doctor (StillWaters1) - One of my absolute favourites. Sherlock whump too.  Doctor John everybody; stand clear.

De Ses Cendres (Amphigoric Symphony) - Tortured epic saga where Magnusson goes after Sherlock and well, everybody suffers. Endlessly

The Third Brother (uglycrow) - Another favourite. John gets wounded during a visit to the Three Garridebs.

The River Variations (withoutawish) - John gets hurt during a Three Garridebs encounter and Sherlock fractures

Into Dark Waters (Breath4Soul) - (TFP) John waits for Sherlock in the Holmes mansion’s well. He runs out of time.

We go anywhere but to the ground (geordielover) - Read the warnings. Sherlock is gone and John…. breaks.

There but for the Grace of John Watson / The Boys of Baker Street (skyefullofstars) - Parts one and two of a trilogy where John is kidnapped, drugged and becomes addicted and Sherlock is tested to the extreme. Bonus Sherlock whump amongst this sweeping narrative.

Reaction (Blind_Author) - Read the warnings. What happens to John before the semtex and vest incident at the pool.

Triage (scullyseviltwin) - John gets shot. Sherlock falls apart. The aftermath of that…

Handle With Care (TheGracefulBlueCat) - John gets attacked with a scorpion. What is it with these men and scorpions??

Very Good Indeed (stillwaters01) - John diagnoses what toxin he’s been drugged with and has seconds to guide Sherlock to saving him.

Deal (Basser**) - John underestimates his injury and scares Sherlock (**this author does lovely whumplets)

DO YOU KNOW WHO THIS BELONGS TO. 8 CAN’T FIND THE ORIGINAL POSTER. BUT I LOVE IT