The heavy rainfall in Zhengzhou has brought back all kinds of eaters to reality.
Zhengzhou, a big city with a population of more than 10 million, was actually in mourning during a rainstorm. Streets, subways, and hospitals were massively stranded.
One tweet that caught my attention was that the sender's father was hospitalized in the ICU and on a ventilator, and after the power outage, not only was he unreachable, the ventilator was inoperable, and he was in a precarious state of uncertainty about whether he would live or die.
Many people have also asked me what would happen to the hospital if there was no power supply at all. Would many people die?
What about the ventilators?
In fact, the principle of a ventilator is to blow air into the patient's lungs at a certain frequency. Without a ventilator, a breathing bag can be used, and air can be squeezed into the patient's lungs by squeezing a ball of skin by hand. But the problem is that the first hand is very tired, a few minutes is okay, if a few minutes that is very difficult to hold.
The second is that hand squeezing is inefficient, and if the patient is critically ill, the oxygen saturation soon becomes untenable.
But as long as there is enough manpower, people can take turns operating, desperately pinching!
The second is the drug IV pump. You've no doubt heard that some patients are kept alive by medication, and this medication is usually one that maintains blood pressure and respiration.
This gadget can control the dose of drugs pushed into the patient's body, too fast blood pressure is too high, peripheral blood vessels will be necrotic, too slow blood pressure can not be maintained, the heart, lungs and brain ischemia death.
If not, only people can manually push the drug, or switch to the bottle drops, drops can be judged according to the time to count a few drops a minute, experienced nurses can also control the speed.
The third is the monitor.
Mainly the patient's heart rate, respiration, blood pressure, blood oxygen.
The first line is the heart rate; the second line is the blood oxygen and respiratory rate (reacting to the lack of oxygen in the body); the third is the blood pressure. The most important are the first three lines.
What if you really don't have it?
1, heart rate can be counted pulse, or aortic pulsation, if the arrhythmia, such as premature beat, atrial fibrillation, etc., you can use a stethoscope to listen.
2, respiratory rate can look at the chest rise and fall to count, but the oxygen saturation is not very good detection, if you see the body cold, lips purple, this time the lack of oxygen has been a long time.
3, blood pressure, you can use a manual mercury sphygmomanometer to measure, and keep measuring it. But more accurate arterial blood pressure is difficult to measure.
All in all, it means that if none of them are available, it will take at least one person dedicated to keeping a watchful eye and taking measurements.
What's unique in the ICU is the monitoring of the body's internal environment, which can't be done at all with blood tests and labs, because it's all machine-based.
Taking pictures, doing ultrasound and CT are definitely out of the question.
What if the patient really needs surgery?
It would be back to the Stone Age, and the point is that the diagnosis can't be clear, and you don't know exactly what's wrong!
When there is no CT scan, neurosurgeons use the patient's limb movements and pupil reflexes to roughly determine that the patient has bleeding from a brain injury, but then they can't confirm it. Can only drill a hole in the skull, test to see if there is bleeding, if there is a stasis of blood gushing out, it is the patient's luck, if not, can only be in the next drill. Before the hole is drilled, the patient may already be dead, and the surgery may even hasten the patient's death.
But fortunately, because surgeons have progressed from field doctors, many first aid can still be done, though it may be a little rougher.
For example, there are no suction devices to draw blood, so you can keep wiping with gauze, and there are no electrosurgical knives or electrocoagulation, so a regular scalpel will definitely bleed a bit more, but you can make do. Brain surgery is a little more painful because of the high demand for hemostasis, and brain tissue blood vessels can't be ligated or pressed hard.
For surgery that cuts through bone, there are no drills, milling cutters or other implements, so you can get by with a hand-cranked drill, bone-biting pliers, bone cutters and bone chisels.
Then there's suturing the wound, which itself doesn't require electricity.
Of course, those vascular interventions, lumpectomies, and endoscopic procedures, they certainly can't be done. Because they need to look at the lesion through the monitor, no electricity did not work at all.
The toughest is definitely the anesthesiologist, because they need to precisely control the amount of medicine and constantly monitor the patient's condition, as described before. If the anesthesia is slightly deeper, the patient may not wake up; if the anesthesia is shallow, the patient pops up in pain.
In fact, the power outage brought a very important problem is lighting, you say that the cell phone flashlight can be illuminated, not to mention the brightness is not enough. The key range is not enough ah, a surgery for a few hours, the phone will soon not work. At this time, if not equipped with a candle, can not see. Equipped with a candle, the light of the candle is unable to meet the requirements of surgery, because most of the surgery is deep inside the human body. A shadowless lamp, usually surgeons love to answer, now let us high!
And finally there is good news for you, many of the machines mentioned above are actually rechargeable, meaning they can work for a while even if the power goes out. This is equipped for patient transfers within hospitals, and the problem is that charging only manages to work for a very, very short time, and there are only a limited number of them.
In principle, if the power suddenly goes out in a hospital, minor patients rush to find a place to stay on their own, because it takes a couple of paramedics to save a serious one, pull out their cell phones for illumination, pinch the skinny if they need to, and all treatment and drug administration is switched to manual. Surgeries that are halfway done don't ask for the whole thing, and wrap it up in a hurry.
If it takes more than an hour, the problem arises. The resuscitation is definitely not intense enough, and some critically ill patients who are already dying may not be able to hold on.
If it's more than 3 hours, very urgent patients will go from lightweight to heavy, or even from critically ill to dead because they can't be examined and can't be operated on, especially some elderly patients, and newborns in incubators.
If it is more than 24 hours, it must be a disaster. Most of the instrument-dependent critically ill patients are left to chance, and the doctors are at the limit of their energy and stamina.
Finally, having said all that, the best hope is that this does not happen. Electricity is already the infrastructure of infrastructures, and restoring power to the hospital would save a lot of lives.
Jungzhou hold on, come on!