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DOES NE 1 HAVE any good cadaver stories?
maybe you should ask in the allo threadDOES NE 1 HAVE any good cadaver stories?
He could barely hold 88% oxygenation on 15L NRB and 6L nasal cannula.
Point taken.....I've only seen one hospital that does the NRB+NC thing and I think that's a sign of an RT department with serious issues.That's how he coded...they had put him on a bipap, decided he needed to go back down the progressive care unit. Well on transfer they took of the bipap, and only put the pt on 15L NRB. It happened right at shift change, and I still don't trust the RT who was handling it.
BUt yeah, from other RT's I know they all say the same thing. The hospital's policy with the stuff is bad, especially vent. weening.
But then the MD had talked with the pt's sons repeatedly about a DNR, and they insisted on their father being a full code. The MD for the patient is one of our best intesivists, so witholding the bipap just might have been a necessary evil.
I work weekend nights on a general med floor of the local hospital. About three weeks prior, we had gotten a patient who never should have been let out of the step down unit, or even the cc unit. Surgeons had removed nodules from this 80something year old's lungs. He could barely hold 88% oxygenation on 15L NRB and 6L nasal cannula. His heart was in a-fib in the 100s to 140s. This was his baseline. Had been for weeks. BUT HE WAS A FULL CODE. Finally, after weeks of getting attached to the guy, he coded on us. We got him back to the point he told his sons he didn't want to live like that, and he was extubated that night.
I was so shaken by the experience (I'd worked a number of codes before, but I didn't know them as persons as well as I knew and liked this guy), it stuck with me for weeks.
But the worse part was that week during my A&P lab (looking at cadavers the med students have already dissected), I could have sworn I saw my patient! Then I looked a little bit harder and realized that the cadaver was female!
don't get attached to your patients
CC Unit- Critical care or coronary care unitI didn't understand any of what you said, but I guess all of this jargon will make perfect sense when I am a med student (hopefully)
In my summer job i worked with my dad in a warehouse. There was a guy there who was a lumper (paid by truckers to restack stuff to fit our racks). He looked like the marshmellow villain at the end of ghostbusters. Just a big fat alcoholic, just your run of the mill low-life. nice guy though. anyway, he disappreared for a few months. The first few weeks no one worried because he regualry disappreared on binges for days. after a few months no one could find him. they checked his usually hangouts: county jail, half-way houses, extended family. Didn't appear anywhere. Another problem was his business partner (if being a lumper is business) and no one else knew his real name, he went by a word that meant fat guy, that i'm not gonna mention. I only knew he real first name because he told me the first time i met him, but his name isn't exactly rare. So may dad told me when i left for school as a joke to keep an eye out for him in the cadaver lab, and have pity on whoever gets him cuz they may need a few extra buckets. cruel i know, but if you had meant this guy, he'd say the same thing.
A couple weeks into school my dad sends a text message to me while im in lab that said, call off the search, we found him. Apparently he was drying out somewhere in northern wisconsin, like 7 hours away. the text gave me a laugh.
I guess you had to be there.
One cadaver had a small metal rod inserted in his arm with language on it we didn't recognize. There was no scar above it at all. Proof of alien probes?
Why "no ****"? You make it sound like this is uncommon. Just out of curiosity was it a meso?Our cadaver had a basketball sized tumor that took up where his right lung should be. He died of ARDS (Acute Resp Distress Syndrome). No ****.
Ah, the catch all nursing diagnosis. It's not sad in the sense you seem to be implying......it doesn't mean that they were not receiving adequate care.....it just happens sometimes, particularly in patients with cancer or multiple chronic illnesses."failure to thrive."
In my summer job i worked with my dad in a warehouse. There was a guy there who was a lumper (paid by truckers to restack stuff to fit our racks). He looked like the marshmellow villain at the end of ghostbusters. Just a big fat alcoholic, just your run of the mill low-life. nice guy though. anyway, he disappreared for a few months. The first few weeks no one worried because he regualry disappreared on binges for days. after a few months no one could find him. they checked his usually hangouts: county jail, half-way houses, extended family. Didn't appear anywhere. Another problem was his business partner (if being a lumper is business) and no one else knew his real name, he went by a word that meant fat guy, that i'm not gonna mention. I only knew he real first name because he told me the first time i met him, but his name isn't exactly rare. So may dad told me when i left for school as a joke to keep an eye out for him in the cadaver lab, and have pity on whoever gets him cuz they may need a few extra buckets. cruel i know, but if you had meant this guy, he'd say the same thing.
A couple weeks into school my dad sends a text message to me while im in lab that said, call off the search, we found him. Apparently he was drying out somewhere in northern wisconsin, like 7 hours away. the text gave me a laugh.
I guess you had to be there.
I didn't understand any of what you said, but I guess all of this jargon will make perfect sense when I am a med student (hopefully)
*The cadaver next to us died of ephedrine addiction. There was absolutely no body fat. NONE.
*My friend dragged me over to her cadaver and told me to grab the penis. I was of course like....why? but she said it was very interesting what would happen. So, I did and then she grabbed the testes and started squeezing them. With each squeeze, the penis got more hard and erect. Turns out he had a penis pump and I was holding the boner of a dead guy.
*The oldest physician/professor of anatomy was demonstrating the various landmarks of the anus by inserting his finger. WITHOUT gloves. "At the knuckle, you're at the dentate line." Later he was looking through the Netter atlas and licking his finger to turn the pages. Gross.
This isn't a cadaver story, but my old bio teacher (really nice guy, but really odd) told us that he would cook us a meal during the last week of class.
Second to last day of the semester and he comes in with a grocery bag and a grill.
Just to freak us out, he said that he got the "freshest duck on the market" from the local supermarket and took out a dead duck carcass (he had obviously shot it....he showed us the hole where the bullet hit in the throat).
Anyway, you can't just cook a duck carcass so he got a pair of scissors and a scalpel and just started tearing this poor duck to shreds. He ripped a hole in the duck's abdomen and just started grabbing organs/organ systems with his bare hands, identifying the parts as he went. While pulling apart this duck, he would intermittently drink coffee so by the end of it, his styrofoam coffee cup was blood red.
He then took out the chicken breasts and put them on the grill.
Needless to say, no one wanted to eat the duck. In response, he called us a bunch of consumer pansies.
-Dr. P.
it was like a scene from a mob movie. and in any other context, utterly absurd.
I went on a tour of UT Houston.
The guide showed us a cadaver.
It was wierd because all the people that didn't want to see it, are applying for med school(and have a way better chance than I do).
Actually you haven't discredited yourself in my eyes.....be proud of the role you play.dropkick murphy:
this will probably discredit me with the knowledge/scope of practice thing and make me sound real critical, but I'm just a nursing assistant. Albeit an extremely over educated nursing assistant, but just a nursing assistant.
I worked my way through undergrad, and figured that I could still learn more from being the hospital, asking questions, and pretty much just keeping my eyes and ears open (rather than using my BS in chem and being a lab rat).
I also have good friends at work who run the ICU on weekend nights. Not only are they great for questions, but on Monday morning (our friday night) we have a little place that will serve a third shifter's dream: breakfast with margaritas! That's where I've learned most of my 'medicine', from listening to them talk about codes, bad patients, harvists, etc.
Oh, I have that beat. One of the nearby cadavers in my lab had a AAA that was, I kid you not, about 2/3 the size of an NFL football. The heart was also about the same size with a few CABGs on it.One of the cadavers had enormous AAA (abdominal aortic aneurysm.) It was about the size of the softball, and no one could believe it hadn't burst.
ugh. bisecting the heads wasn't a big deal to me, but cutting the head off would have disturbed me significantly. transecting the penis gave me day-mares for a few days too.we cut the head off of our cadaver for head and neck. we were down with the body. all of the tissue from a particular (or at least as much of it as is reasonably possible) is stored in a specific polycart for creamation and return to the family.
Yea, why are you applying to become a doctor when you clearly act like you've already become a doctor. You think because you're an emt/paramedic you know everything. How about you criticize more people who are emts and say how poorly hospitals are run.
Oh, I have that beat. One of the nearby cadavers in my lab had a AAA that was, I kid you not, about 2/3 the size of an NFL football. The heart was also about the same size with a few CABGs on it.
He is not a paramedic, he is an EMT-Intermediate. I don't want people getting the wrong ideas about paramedics
One of my paramedic buddies started out as a EMT-B doing what they call 'rat patrol'. This is where you go to the nursing homes at night to pick-up the newly deceased.
It was his second or third night and the other medic was making the newbie sit in back with the corpse. He says that he was just sitting there feeling really uncomfortable when this corpse sat bolt upright in the box.
From the way he described it he busted through the back doors of the ambulance when it was going thirty miles an hour and hit the ground running for dear life.
The other medic had seen it through the rearview and almost wrecked, he was laughing so hard. Apparently, he got almost a mile away before his buddy got back to him and explained that it was just rigor setting in.
-Mike
Oh, I have that beat. One of the nearby cadavers in my lab had a AAA that was, I kid you not, about 2/3 the size of an NFL football. The heart was also about the same size with a few CABGs on it.
might just look like a tumahh.Whoa! That's incredible. Would you even need an ultrasound to see that aneurysm jumping up through the abdominal wall? Absolutely crazy.
Yeah, a pulsating tumor.might just look like a tumahh.
It was probably distally inserted from one of the ends. This is very common in femur fractures (intramedullary nailing)
Why "no ****"? You make it sound like this is uncommon. Just out of curiosity was it a meso?
Ah, the catch all nursing diagnosis. It's not sad in the sense you seem to be implying......it doesn't mean that they were not receiving adequate care.....it just happens sometimes, particularly in patients with cancer or multiple chronic illnesses.
ugh. bisecting the heads wasn't a big deal to me, but cutting the head off would have disturbed me significantly. transecting the penis gave me day-mares for a few days too.
That's amazing. I'm a little jealous - even though the body fat helps keep the cadaver from drying out, it's kind of gross.
Our cadaver was obese, and when we were removing the skin from the leg, we had this enormous pile of semi-liquid fat under each leg. Unfortunately, one of the legs fell out of the stirrup and landed (with a loud splat) on the pile, spraying everyone with a wave of fat and formaldehyde.
um, then that's why you weren't disturbed.The penis wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. Maybe b/c I don't have one
I didn't understand any of what you said, but I guess all of this jargon will make perfect sense when I am a med student (hopefully)
Point taken.....I've only seen one hospital that does the NRB+NC thing and I think that's a sign of an RT department with serious issues.
this thread went to ****
It was just below the skin of the arm lying parallel to the bone. The docs were stumped as well.
Ya, I can see that. It was just wierd though that it was the only cause listed, no other contributing factors like cancer, dementia, etc. Especially when there were other choices like Natural Causes.
I didn't mean to make ARDS or cancer sound uncommon. I meant it like, duh, really? It might be hard to breath with the monster tumor on your lung? (insert sarcastic tone here) and I believe it was a Merkel cell tumor. He had them all over his body but that was by far the biggest.
The bull**** answer I was given was "We do it in case the NRB becomes disconnected, so the patient doesn't suffocate". Now how scary is that?What is the thinking of this? "Hmm...NRB gives ~ 90%. NC gives ~ 24-44%. So logically, NRB + NC would give him ~114-134% O2!!"
??