speaking of dead people with stomas
well, it sure smelled like it...
I remember when one of my first shifts on the ambulance. My unit received
a call for a "woman not breathing." Upon arrival, we found a fifty-ish
woman on the front steps of her apartment, in cardiac arrest. The fire
department had already arrived, and was trying to rescucitate her. There
was one small problem: this woman had a permanent tracheostomy stoma or
"hole" in her neck, so it confused the firefighters to no end - everytime
they tried to "bag" this woman, all the air would go out the stoma. Oh, did
I mention that she also had lung cancer, and was ooozing some black liquid
from her mouth and stoma - lots of it? This is what the fire department
decided to do: the got a length of oxygen tubing (about 1/4 in dia.) and
SHOVED the entire length of tubing DOWN into the stoma and into her lungs.
The other end they hooked up to an oxygen tank and they let fly. The result:
one owman who had previously been described as "98 pounds soaking wet",
looking like Dolly Parton - as a chipmunk. In come unsuspecting medic - me,
sees the tubing, pulls THREE FEET of plastic tubing out of this stoma,
which was covered with some black tarry looking substance. I finally get
to the end of it, and as soon as I pull it out - a straight stream of BLACK
GOOEY STUFF for a dead woman's lungs comes straight at my face, splattering
my entire body. Fire lieutenant:"What the hell happened." my partner (the
smarter medic):"Well Lieutenant, this woman died - personally I heard she
was under a lot of pressure." Three showers later - I still did not feel
clean.
Lessons learned:
1) Always let someone else do the dangerous stuff - firefighter, police,
your partner.
2) Never connect anyone to oxygen tubing and deliver 50 pounds per square
inch into their lungs - makes for poor recovery.
3) When in doubt: put body in bushes and say you couldn't find 'em.
____________________________________________________________________
| Tae-Hyong Kim e-mail: ST87...@pip.cc.brandeis.edu |
| "You call it corn, I call it GOD." |
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Oh yeah, she didn't survive either.