Whipped Cream Difficulties

I’m not a huge fan of bull riding (though I do think it is much more interesting than soccer), and I don’t care much for “People” magazine.

But, as an amateur medical geek, when I see a phrase like “first person to survive the procedure at the hospital this century”, it kind of makes me take notice.

Wyatt Bruesch was competing in an Idaho rodeo when the bull he was riding bucked him off and trampled him fatally.

After he was airlifted to the Portneuf Medical Center in Pocatello, he flatlined three times in the emergency room.

The emergency department decided on a hail mary pass: an “emergency department thoracotomy.”

“You don’t perform it until the patient is literally at death’s doorstep and about to die,” Drew McRoberts, Portneuf Medical Center‘s trauma director, told People. “The odds of surviving an ED thoracotomy are extremely low, which is why they’re rarely done.”

Here’s the Trauma.org page on the subject (it’s also linked in the article itself).

Emergency department thoracotomy is a life-saving procedure in a select group of patients. Exactly who these patients are is a matter of some controversy in the trauma literature. There is a significant amount of published data on the indications for and outcomes of resuscitative thoracotomy. However the results of interventions varies widely, as does each unit’s experience, puclished data ranging for 11 patients in 10 years to 950 patients in 23 years…
Overall survival of patients undergoing emergency thoracotomy is between 4 and 33% depending on the protocols used in individual departments. The main determinants for survivability of an emergency thoracotomy are the mechanism of injury (stab, gunshot or blunt), location of injury and the presence or absence of vital signs.

Anyway:

Acting quickly, trauma surgeon Jorge Amorim cut Wyatt’s chest open and massaged his heart by hand to get it beating again.
“He basically saved his life,” McRoberts said. “He also did something else. Dr. Amorim reached into the chest cavity and squeezed and held the hilum of the lung where the great vessels come into the lung. He continued to squeeze for 15 minutes, which stopped the bleeding as Wyatt was rushed to an operating room.”

Mr. Bruesch is at home, recovering. In addition to the injuries that required an emergency thoracotomy, he also broke three ribs and eight vertebrae. In spite of this, he says he’s going to continue bull riding.

Meanwhile, in Pocatello, there’s a trauma surgeon shopping for a wheelbarrow to carry his giant brass testicles.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2018 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Geek, Mammals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.