Polite Dissent

Black Lightning Year One #4
Jen Van Meter, writer
Cully Hamner, penciler

Black Lightning (Jeff Pierce) comes home and finds his friend Peter shot and dying on his front steps. When he cannot detect a pulse, Jeff gives him a large shock.

Not really the best idea.

For once, I’m not going to lecture about “don’t shock a flatline” because that’s precisely the problem — we don’t know what the heart rhythm is. Jeff checked the pulse, but Peter’s lost an awful lot of blood (check the comic for yourself to see, I can’t reprint every panel) — there’s probably not enough left to give any sort of pulse, even if the heart were beating normally. Jeff may be shocking a heart beating normally, or one in ventricular fibrillation, or a flatline — the point is he doesn’t know, and so it’s not a good idea to blindly shock.

Peter’s problems are his massive blood loss and his gunshot wounds. Any heart issues are secondary to these. It’s fine to treat the heart, but it’s not going to do any good if the hemorrhage isn’t dealt with quickly — or if one of the bullets wounded the heart.

Other Thoughts:
1. Now in real life, a situation like this isn’t going to happen: if you have access to a modern defibrillator or an AED, you have access to a basic heart monitor because they are built into the machine. Sure, the monitor’s not usually fancy, but it’s enough get the job done.

2. The reason two paddles are used in defibrillation is to make an electrical circuit with the heart in the middle. Is that what’s happening here? Is current flowing from one of Jeff’s hands into the other? (His hand position’s a little off too, unless he meant to defibrillate the sternum.)

3. Admittedly, Black Lightning’s reaction here is more emotional than medical, and I can’t really fault him for that — but I can use him as a teaching point.

4. Kudos to Jeff for remembering to open up Peter’s shirt before shocking him.

5. If it were me in this scenario? While the electrical powers may look cool, they don’t really change the treatment: I’d keep the airway open, stop the bleeding as much as possible, and provide CPR until properly equipped help arrived.

6. As cliché would have it, despite being found down and pulseless, Peter is able to revive enough to whisper his last words to Jeff.

Tags: comics medicine black lightning defibrillation