We thought that if we could trap blood in the extremities, we’d reduce preload enough to relieve the pulmonary edema. Once upon a time, we used to think that acute pulmonary edema and decompensated congestive heart failure was caused by too much blood re-entering the lungs. Nowadays we have tube holders and IV dressings, and taping is a lost art like calligraphy and darning your socks. And we used to tear a one-inch strip of tape longitudinally for a few inches, wrapping one strip around the endotracheal tube and the other across the face like a big mustache.Īnd then someone would promptly rip our IV or endotracheal tube out while we were loading the patient, so we got to do it again. We fashioned elegant little chevrons of tape over the wings on our IV catheter hubs (seriously, they had wings) to secure them without obscuring the cannulation site. When I was a paramedic student, my instructor took great pains to show us how to tear thin little strips of adhesive tape to secure IV catheters and endotracheal tubes. We used to do this whenever someone had a seizure, in the mistaken belief that if we didn’t get their mouth open, they’d swallow their tongue.īut the real reason was that it gave paramedics with a juvenile sense of humor the opportunity to hold out their hands and bark, "Gimme an oral screw!" And what you did was insert the small end of this doohickey between someone’s teeth when their jaws were clenched, and screwed it in until it forced their jaws apart. Picture - because I am afraid of what you might stumble across if you Google "oral screws" - if you will a little plastic doohickey shaped like a miniature ice cream cone with threads on the outer surface and a T-handle on the large end. The EOA was a supraglottic airway that was bulky, often caused trauma on insertion, did a poor job of isolating the trachea and protecting against aspiration and still required that you maintain a mask seal.Īnd to think that nobody uses these beauties anymore! Crazy, right? 7. Imagine if a Combitube and a BVM had a baby, and the airway baby inherited the worst features of each. And you did this thing called a quick look, so that you could immediately shock the patient, like, three times in a row, before you even attached the monitor leads.Īnd by God, we were grateful. And you had to apply conductive gel to them and smear it around then you had to press them on the chest with at least 25 pounds of paddle pressureĪnd you had your energy select dial and defib button right there on the paddles. You kids these days with your hippity-hop music and your iThings and your hands-free multifunction electrodes.… Why, in my day, when we wanted to defibrillate someone, we had these things called paddles. Dinosaurs, say them with me now: “Bilateral large bore IV access, two units of typed and matched blood, surgical team on standby, deflate the abdominal section for 10 seconds, recheck the blood pressure …” 9. Not only did we have to know the different methods of applying them, like the diaper method and the pajama method, we also had to memorize the criteria for removal. It did raise blood pressure very well - to the point that the patient bled pink from all the IV fluids we gave, but those magic pants sucked at saving lives. See, back in the day we used to put these inflatable Velcro pants on shock patients, and when inflated, it raised their blood pressure. I only spell it out because if I said MAST or PASG, I’d still have to explain it to you young whippersnappers. If you've used all or some of this museum-worthy equipment, you've been around the block a few times
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |