Polite Dissent

Junior Doctor: The patient is still unresponsive. Vitals are weak, but stable. Parents’ whereabouts unknown…

Attending: Increase the zolpidem by 50 milliliters twice a day.
Junior Doctor: Yes Doctor.

First off, Zolpidem is better known as the sleep aid Ambien.

That brings up an obvious question: why would the doctors give a sleeping pill to a patient who’s already unresponsive?

There’s actually a logical reason for that: evidence has been accumulating that zolpidem improves the state of people in comas, and may actually wake some patients from their comas. It only seems to work for certain types of coma, plus most of this evidence is anecdotal — and it’s always wise to take that kind of evidence with a grain of salt — but the idea is certainly intriguing.

Good job by Vanhook for including this appropriate yet fairly obscure medical research in the story.

Finally, a few words about the art:
There’s a very good attention to detail. IVs are in the right place (though the right IV doesn’t seem to be attached to anything), pulse oximeter is on the finger, and she’s wearing a hospital bracelet. There may be a few too many monitors, but she’s in the ICU, so who can tell?

However, a common error does surface here: patients on ventilators (breathing machines) who are drawn wearing oxygen masks. The bottom line: masks don’t work for patients on ventilators because there’s too much resistance for the air to get to the lungs. Patients on ventilators need to be intubated (a breathing tube down the throat) — or for long term patients, have the ventilator hooked up to a tracheostomy.