For Writers That Like Hurting Their Characters

For writers that like hurting their characters

(you know who you are)

Any semi serious injury to the arms or legs can be fatal. If an artery is struck the person can bleed out in 2-5 minutes. If an artery is struck then blood will be violently spraying out of the body, as opposed to regular bleeding where the blood just leaks.

A way to stop severe bleeding is with a tourniquet. A proper tourniquet that you would expect to find in any trauma response kit, as using a shirt or anything in your environment as a tourniquet won't be very effective. The tourniquet should be placed a few inches above the wound, and tightened. The tightening process is going to be extremely painful, as it's clamping down hard enough to cut off the blood circulation. Important to note that a limb won't be at risk of being amputated unless the tourniquet has been applied for hours.

Another way to stop severe bleeding is wound packing. This is where you take gauze and fill up a wound with it. The point is to cover the area that's bleeding, so that you can apply pressure to the specific part of the body that's bleeding heavily. Applying pressure directly on top of where the blood is coming from should get it to stop, however this will again be painful for the victim.

Losing blood makes it harder to regulate your body temperature, so it's extremely dangerous to be losing blood in a cold environment. However, a victim can still get cold in warm areas from blood loss, so most trauma response kits will have specific blankets that will help the victim regulate their temperature.

Any wound that punctures the chest area is extremely dangerous. Air will begin filling into the chest cavity, which will leave the lungs with less room to expand. Eventually the lung or lungs will collapse from the lack of room, this is extremely painful. And this will all be even worse if the attack pierced a lung, which will be filling with blood. All of this will make it extremely hard to breathe. There are pads in a trauma response kit that you place over a chest wound, and they're designed to vent air out of the chest cavity while not letting any more air in. However lungs filling up with body fluids is not something you can treat on the field, and will require proper medical attention.

Getting clapped on the ears hurts and can disorient you.

Any impact to the nose will make the sinuses flare up and the eyes water, making a fight more difficult.

Any impact to the back of the skull can be fatal, or cause severe brain damage.

It's extremely easy to rip off a human ear.

The liver is located on the lower right side of the rib cage, it would be on your left side if you were looking at someone else's liver. Any impact there can put any person on the ground, as it's extremely painful to be hit there. Punches to the liver drop many professional boxers.

Kidneys are mostly the same, except they aren't protected by anything at all. Located in the lower back, the kidneys are completely unprotected from any attack. Any impact here can drop someone just like a liver punch. (I was in the gym one time and hit my kidney pretty hard on a bar and almost collapsed from the pain)

A proper punch is thrown in a way to where the knuckles are the only thing that make contact. This is so that all the force is being spread out across a much smaller area, increasing the damage to the victim.

Any impact to the neck can be fatal, and will make a person immediately start choking, making them completely open in a fight.

Removing anything that's impaled into a person will only make them bleed out faster.

Your body will force you to inhale right before drowning, which we all know it burns like hell to have water in your lungs. Plenty of people that have almost drowned have said that their body forced them to take a breath, even if there was no air to breathe.

The brain inhibits your full strength, as we're strong enough to completely rip our muscles. In times of need, the brain will let go of this limitation, basically granting you super strength. There's plenty of cases where someone was able to lift something off of someone, such as a lawn mower or car, but wasn't able to move it at all later on.

While you can live without water for a few days, maybe even longer than 3 depending on a bunch of factors, that is specifically "living". You can expect to see severe side effects of dehydration long before the person dies. Extreme kidney pain, headaches, hallucinations, dry skin, some organ failure ect.

paradoxical sensation is where you're so cold that you actually feel hot. Plenty of people have been in extremely cold environments and started removing their clothes, as they were so cold that they felt like they were burning.

The body will begin to eat itself if it's gone long enough with no food.

You have an extreme lack of depth perception with only 1 eye. You can test this out by walking around and doing tasks with only 1 eye open.

When blood and dirt and anything else gets in the hair, untangling the hair and straightening it out is extremely painful. It may even result in pulling some hair out, it might be better to shave it off if it's bad enough.

Any recent wounds sting when exposed to water, which makes taking a shower a nightmare when you have multiple of these on your body at once.

As popular as the trope is, consciousness has no effect on your survival. The "don't go to sleep" while a character is bleeding out doesn't really help, meaning you can let your character pass out or fall asleep while they're dying. This can lead to a character thinking they won't wake up while they're fighting off sleep, only to wake up in a hospital bed.