[Cheese]

Many years ago I was helping a friend clear a cut line on his property, in the middle of winter. We were about 3 or 4km away from the truck and cutting trees with chainsaws. A young fella who was helping me accidentally pushed/bumped the tree I was cutting back towards me. I didnt notice it right away, but the tree hit the chainsaw back into my left knee. I looked down a few secs later and noticed that my jeans had a giant tear, but was more concerned with the ever increasing red stain. I put the saw down, opened the tear in my jeans to see a gaping cut where the chainsaw had hit me. It was at least -20C and deep snow so that likely helped me survive a significant blood loss. I immediately grabbed snow and packed it on my knee and wrapped a cloth tourniquet around my upper leg. I yelled to my buddy that we needed to hit the road to a hopsital quickly or I might bleed to death. Fortunately he liked me, and after understanding the immediate concern, we were off. Now hiking through deep snow is usually not to much of an issue, but with a knee that was cut and bleeding profusely it made the journey hellish to say the least. We got to the truck and ended up in a small rural hospital, which was about 45 minutes from the truck. I was not in a good mood and the pain was literally ripping up my left thigh by this time. We walked into the hospital and quickly let the duty nurse know what happened. They got me into a wheelchair and into a small surgical room pretty quickly, I was thankful. Lost a lot of blood and the pain was pretty intense, but it took a good hour before that started. Pretty thankful there was a lot of snow and it was cold out that day!
50 stitches later, and fortunately no significant damage, I was out.