Comments on: Picture Quiz: New X-Men

By: Bad

Bad — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 02:15:12 +0000

I think we all missed another rather important point: what patient in a critical condition that doesn’t seem to have any voluntary movement would be kept in a skin tight leather/rubber/whatevertheheckitis X-Man uniform? Has Forge never heard of bed sores? Did someone even bother to take off his pants so that he could have a bedpan or does he wake up from his coma every so often to take a bathroom break?

By: B.J. Smith

B.J. Smith — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 18:36:03 +0000

The nasal cannula and the ventilator tubing is the redundancy. Oxygen is already being taken to his lung and ventilated through the endotrachel tube and ventilator…the nasal cannula is completely pointless.

By: suedenim

suedenim — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 14:57:57 +0000

Perhaps a more minor point, but Aren’t the nose tubes themselves drawn oddly? They do split before going to each nostril, but the implication here is that each nostril gets its own separate oxygen tank or something, one on each side of the bed….

By: Sean

Sean — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 20:12:50 +0000

needs more respirators

By: Bad

Bad — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 14:26:29 +0000

I bet I know what the point of having tubes in his noses even though he’s intubated is for though!

You see, with his brain function being “off the map,” he’s sure to have psychic nosebleeds. Those tubes will suck away the blood so that it doesn’t drip down into his esophagus or past the sides of the intubation tube into his lungs.

By: Bad

Bad — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 14:23:41 +0000

Coma doesn’t mean no brain function: like many neurological disorders it’s one of those medical definitions that is based more on the patient’s overt and external responses rather than any specific pathology we can identify in the brain. Coma is most simply defined as when the patient is unconscious and cannot be woken up: so unconscious that they will not respond to pain or light or show conscious responses. The closest thing to being able to measure someone’s brain activity and declare “coma” is the lack of sleep/wake cycles. But we still can’t really look into someone’s brain and say “look, this structure is damaged, that means coma” or even “look, he has the specific brain wave patterns of the classic coma.” In fact, there isn’t any one single condition as “coma”: there are all sorts of scales and progression trajectories for comas based on changes in behavior over time.

Saying that someone’s “brain function” is “off the map” is probably pretty much technobabble. It’s not clear at all what that really means.

By: Laura

Laura — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 09:31:36 +0000

There’s no redundancy. He’s got an ET tube, coupled with a high-tech nasal mucus drain. On either side of the bed (not seen) are buckets filling with snot. It’s a medical wonder, I tell you. I’m going to have to get that set up for my next bout with hayfever so I can sleep through the night so soundly that it appears that I’m in a coma, even though my brain is whirring away at higher level activities. The self-intubation will be a bear, but a small price to pay for actually getting some sleep.

Other things confuse me. He is in uniform; did someone lose all the scissors or is there a new approach that recommends that coma patients be left in tight fitting garments? Doesn’t that make placement of the urinary catheter tricky? And how do they know anything about his brain, or his heart for that matter, what with there not being any probes? I’m not a medical professional, but I’ve sort of come to expect some actual, you know, monitoring of neurological cases. There must be a logical answer to these questions, but my thinking cap blew up after I figured out about the nasal drainage device.

By: Loren

Loren — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 19:04:23 +0000

I know it’s a standard mistake in these scenes, but what’s holding the cannula in his nose?

By: jonessoda

jonessoda — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 18:32:09 +0000

At first I thought it was kinda strange that he had two big fat tubes running to his ET tube.

Then I noticed he had a nasal cannula.

With an endotracheal tube.

So yeah. That.

I don’t really have experience with ET tubes, so is it normal to have those two big tubes?

By: mike.

mike. — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 18:12:43 +0000

I’m with Carl. Doesn’t “coma” mean no brain function? But that would be contradiction, not redundancy. Hmmm.