I've always heard the perennial saying, "With friends like these, who needs enemies?"  In this case, I find it to be very truthful.

About an hour ago, we treated two gentlemen who arrived via ambulance to our Emergency Room.  I happened to be on call at the time and they needed my assistance, so I willingly obliged.

The two men were covered in blood, one more than the other.  The one guy had been hit in the head and was quickly approaching unconsciousness.  We knew we had to get him treated, and fast, before he had a chance to bleed out all over our emergency room.  The other guy was nursing a bloody nose and had a fat lip.  Obviously there had been a scuffle of some kind before the one man started bleeding heavily after being hit in the head.

The guy who was in better shape told me  his name as well as the name of his friend; both were age 35 and residents of Nashville.  The man who was doing all the talking was a welder; the other, a store clerk.  They were both off work today and decided to go hunting before daybreak.  All was going well until the one fellow shot the deer that the other fellow had intended to shoot and after an exchange of a few harsh words, the fighting soon escalated into fists flying.  The fighting ended when the first man hit the other in the back of the head with the butt of his gun, knocking him to the ground.  

When the man saw all the blood that was pouring out of his friend's head, he got scared, so he panicked and called 9-1-1 for an ambulance.

The man in question told me that they were best friends.

The guy who was in worse shape was aleady being tended to by an army of doctors and nurses, who soon had him hooked up to lines, tubes, and monitors, as they prepped him for surgery.  The other guy's nose was packed with cotton and I advised the fellow to breathe through his mouth untl the bleeding slowed down.  The front of his hunter's shirt was stained crimson with his blood.  He would probably be okay, I surmised; as for the other fellow, time would only tell.  He had a possible fracture to hsi skull.

There would probably be a police report filed since the one man intentionally hit the other.  It was a miracle he didn't kill him, I remember thinking to myself.

The man who had gotten off easy was soon on his way home, but the other fellow was in surgery; he would probably remain there for several hours until his skull fracture could be repaired.  He would then probably spend some time in the Neuro Intensive Care Unit (NICU), recuperating from his injuries.