NaNo project question - internal injuries, amnesia treatments, etc
the canon universe of this fanfic/NaNo novella is slightly in the future (about ten years from present day).
one of my main characters ends up at ground zero during a terrorist bombing and I'm trying to figure out what internal injuries he could end up with that aren't immediately fatal.
internal injuries info/questions:
the bombing happens at noon, he is found at 2am the next morning by a rescue team, who is led by a doctor. She will recognize that he is in very critical condition and immediately send him back to her clinic for emergency surgery so I would say he is on the table in the OR by no later than 2:30am. Point being, he has to survive one way or another. (I have no problem with them having to bring him back from the brink or having to restart his heart or whatever, but he must live, lol.)
source checks for this:
-- googled internal bleeding
-- googled spleen ruptures/injuries
-- looked through tags on here
-- looked through my medical terminology textbook (in school for medical assistant degree!)
and still I'm not finding any definitive answers, since pretty much all sources assume that one can take themselves to the hospital ASAP and are not lying badly injured and half buried in debris for 12 hours! Now I KNOW that rupturing the appendix is out cuz that would kill him within a few hours. (almost had personal experience with this one!) could the spleen be ruptured possibly with a very, very slow bleed? would there be any outwardly visible signs of internal injuries (i.e. swellings under the skin/bruisings of the surface of the skin?) or should i just have my doctor character feel his barely-there pulse and get him sent back to her clinic ASAP and he finds out later just how bad it was?
amnesia info/questions:
(having googled/read through tags on here, apparently retrograde amnesia rarely happens, but since this part of my plot won't work otherwise, i'm just gonna have to suspend reality since it's fiction lol.)
Doctor character will specialize in neurology and have helped past amnesiac patients before so I am trying to figure out her regiment of therapy to help him with his memory recovery. (he occasionally has dreams which bring details to the surface and I intended that one dream will actually fully bring his memory back--minus remembering the bombing itself. he'll remember stuff leading up to the explosion but will have to be told later that he was injured in it, how they found him, etc etc.)
Besides talking to him/getting him to detail what he remembers from the dreams, what sorts of things would she do since she can't resort to usual measures? (See * below) The first dream he has is remembering his college days, so one of my thoughts was that she would pull up an image gallery of college campuses that fit his general descriptives and see if he recognizes anything in the photos.
* - he is a Navy officer undercover under an assumed name so if he has ID on him, it will be under the assumed name, which won't help in any way. This also means that my Doctor character can't bring in any relatives/friends to help talk to him because if she tries an info search under the assumed name, it will come up blank/with fake info that doesn't help her.
Other important FYI plot bits that factor in:
- his crew will find evidence (mostly blood that tests as his type) and a witness (native child) and therefore he will be declared dead. It will be all over the news. Would my Doctor character mention/show him any of this stuff before he regains his memory? (basically stuff that mentions him by his real name to try and jog his memory in that direction)
- the bombing happens in a territory that is not on the best of terms with the territory that includes the US. once my Doctor finds out just who her patient really is (it's several weeks due to the somewhat remote location of her clinic and the aftermath of the terrorist attack), is it terribly unethical for her to decide that she is gonna withhold the fact that she has him alive as a patient instead of contacting his territory's officials to say that he is alive? (i can go either way but it would be fun to throw in a little conflict for her since she is a minor character)
thanks in advance to anyone who can help :)