Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
::Today's soundtrack: Lazlo Bane "(I'm No) Superman" ::
I know I don't talk about my actual life on the internets very much. Heck hardly ever, and that's if I like you. So, you people may be surprised to learn this little tidbit: I work as a medical professional. Weird, huh? You all were probably thinking I had no actual job but instead sat at my computer non-stop Twittering and reading webcomics. I do do those things, but not as often as you would think, because as it turns out, I have an actual job. Who knew?
Well, being a medical professional and having been one for about ten years now, I have a certain expanse of medical type knowledge and experience. You may think that this is pretty neat, and yeah, it can be. I can tell you that it is often a big downer though, especially when I want to watch television or movies, and this is pretty damn often. The problem is, within television and movies, they frequently depict medical type things poorly or even dead inaccurately. Let me elaborate.
First off, as I said, I have been doing what I do for about ten years. In those ten years I have NEVER ONCE been in the presence of an explosion. Fires yes, explosions NEVER. Terrible vehicle accidents, yes, explosions still NONE. Oh, and I have never seen a helicopter crash either. Sorry to disappoint everyone, but the life of your everyday medical person is decidedly NOT explosion riddled.
My biggest most irritating inaccuracy is when I see them shock a flatline. Here's a lesson for all of you: a defibrillator CAUSES a temporary flatline. This is its express purpose! You shock somebody who has crazy heart rhythms. The shock is like hitting a reset button on the heart. You make it STOP beating with the hopes that when it STARTS beating again it will beat correctly. Therefore, shocking a flatline would DO NOTHING! Have we all got that?
I also cannot stand seeing CPR depicted poorly. I'm even going to let it slide when they get the breath-to-compression ratio wrong. That doesn't bother me too, too much. It's often the WAY they perform the compressions that gets me. Here's a tip: the CORRECT way to do chest compressions is with your arms STRAIGHT and elbows locked. You want to put your full weight into those suckers, so you are using your back, if that makes sense. What your are NOT doing is managing to compress a chest by pressing down at your elbows. Think about it: you need to beat the heart. The heart is protected inside the rib cage. You need to flex the ribs in order to pump the heart. The flexing of ribs takes a great amount of pressure! You would need some supremely strong arms to do this at the elbows!
On a related note, in television and movies CPR works far too often. Sorry to burst another bubble for you kids, but CPR only really works about 1 in 100 times. I have seen it work, so it isn't completely useless and 1 in 100 chance is better than no chance, but the way Hollywood shows it off, you'd think almost everyone is revived by CPR (except for Buffy's mom). Sadly, that isn't the case.
Also, after performing CPR for fifteen minutes, getting upset, shaking the body and yelling at it to "never give up" or "you've never quit on anything before so don't quit now" doesn't work 100% of the time like the movies tell us it does. In fact, it works NEVER. Stop doing it already!
And lastly, the wanton misuse of medical jargon. Holy god, this has got to stop. Sometimes some miscellaneous television show will have one scene take place in a hospital and the writers obviously have no idea what they are writing about. It's like they have point A (character enters ER with gunshot wound) and point B (character survives wound and talks to other main characters about it) and they need to fill in between the points with a tension filled scene where someone may die but has no idea what medical procedures would be involved and then proceed to make shit up that sounds vaguely medical and impressive because they heard it on a General Hospital rerun the other day. The worst recurring offender is when someone in the room will shout the heart rhythm, like say, "she's going into V-tac!" because it sounds all medically, but we can clearly see her heart monitor and that is NOT what the EKG says at all! But that's okay because you'll just cover that up by shouting off inappropriate drugs and saying "STAT" a lot. D'oh....
I'm getting myself all irked just writing about this stuff. I imagine people in other professions have the same issue when they see their job portrayed in the movies and such. It doesn't help matters when friends see a programme or film that has something to do with the line of work and assume we're interested in or like it, when in fact from what we've seen so far we are not very impressed by the poor depiction. It would only take some simple research to get this stuff right, you know!
William the Bloody (medical advisor)
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