Haha! My grandfather was an orthopaedic surgeon in Edinburgh, and a friend of Mr Wallace...
In-flight surgery with a coat-hanger and silverware
91–100 of 217 posts
Re: In-flight surgery with a coat-hanger and silverware
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is surgery “successful” when they used a coat hanger? Can you imagine the infection risk? And sure, fly another 1-2 hr to get to the final destination, but they flew 8+ hours. It kinda makes no sense.
They mention in passing that cognac was used to disinfect things. Not foolproof, but not exactly a sepsis inducing nightmare either.
Cognac is usually what? 30-40% alcohol?
It needs to be 70%.
https://www.cdc.gov/infectioncontrol/guidelines/disinfection...
Re: In-flight surgery with a coat-hanger and silverware
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, these things just happen for a variety of reasons. Smoking/vaping puts you at higher risk. There's probably other risk factors too.
The most common category is "primary spontaneous". Predominantly young (85% <40yo), healthy males (6 times more common). Smoking contributes, and I believe being tall and skinny does so as well.
Short and fat--never a smoker. Still collapsed my right one and then the left one a week later. The doctors said they'd never seen that (bilateral in such a short timespan with no apparent cause) and had no idea what could be causing it. I had to laugh. Pectoris Excavatus or other skeletal abnormalities can cause it but I don't have any of those either. Just luck of the draw I guess.
Re: In-flight surgery with a coat-hanger and silverware
#94I've had an spontaneous pneumothorax when I was a teenager. Had to undergo emergency surgery with only local anesthesia. The surgeon while cutting my chest asked: "You're sure it is this side, right?", which I confirmed. He then said: "Ok, if you're wrong I'm not going to jail alone."
This happened to me in college. Driving home from the movies, chest started to hurt on inhale .. I decided to "sleep it off", which obviously didn't work. Went to the ER in the morning. Got the chest tube and spent about a week seeing if it would heal naturally, then they removed the offending part of my lung, and did a mechanical pleurodesis (a procedure that sticks your lung to the chest wall so it can't collapse). All-in, was over two weeks in the hospital, and a good bit of recovery after.
I fit the 5'9", young, male, otherwise healthy group described here.
Re: In-flight surgery with a coat-hanger and silverware
#95This line got me:
"the doctors successfully released the trapped air from the patient's chest, and she spent the rest of the flight uneventfully eating and watching in-flight movies"
Re: In-flight surgery with a coat-hanger and silverware
#96I've had an spontaneous pneumothorax when I was a teenager. Had to undergo emergency surgery with only local anesthesia. The surgeon while cutting my chest asked: "You're sure it is this side, right?", which I confirmed. He then said: "Ok, if you're wrong I'm not going to jail alone."
I did some hostile environment training a while back, one of the medical courses was about "sucking chest wounds", where someone gets shot (or stabbed), and the action of breathing fills the chest cavity and thus means the lung can't work.
It's been a long time since I did the course as I went a few years without having to travel to the kinds of places where it's likely I'd need to apply it, but I do remember a plastic bag and vasseline was recommended if you didn't have a magic sucking chest wound plastic cover thing with a valve on (our med kits contain things like that and tourniquets as well as the usual stuff - including packs of sterile needles etc).
Re: In-flight surgery with a coat-hanger and silverware
#97No post body was provided.
Re: In-flight surgery with a coat-hanger and silverware
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much of a factor is the (relatively) super low air pressure in an airplane at cruising altitude? Does this cause more or less severity wrt the amount of air trapped in the chest?
>> Wallace did not deem a landing at the nearest airport in Delhi to be viable either, because the increase in air pressure during descent could also kill his patient, and thus the only option was to perform an immediate surgery
That does not talk about the complications of the air pressure environment on the surgery itself.
Re: In-flight surgery with a coat-hanger and silverware
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand your point. If it's no longer an emergency, why require an emergency landing?
When you just did surgery with a knife and fork seems like an urgent enough situation to land?
If there are two doctors there saying that the situation is not urgent, then who am I to disagree with them?