Actually, this was a pretty good example of what might happen if worst does come to worse, and everything goes haywire come New Year's. People will not die. Hospitals will make do. Some of us (admittedly, not me) learned medicine back when we didn't have neat toys with multi-channel displays and touch-sensitive LCD panels, and some of us still remember most of what was taught back then. Fundamentally, treatment modalities have not changed significantly in the past few decades; what has changed is largely in the realm of diagnostics, and while that can cause problems when they're not available (witness Mark, Carter, and the perfume patient), there are work arounds. I'm hard-pressed to think of a definitive, life-saving procedure that involves the use of technology dependent upon either electricity or computers, and about the only thing I'm coming up with is the defibrillator. Everything else has a manual equivalent for use when the automatic one fails. (And hey, I have booster cables in my car.)

But direct pressure will still stop most bleeding, IV infusion sets will still deliver fluids (well, as long as this stupid PVC thing stays out of our way), thermometers will still take temperatures, and sutures will still hold skin shut. I'm not terribly worried about Y2K - part of this is having worked with computers for most of my life, and part of it is knowing that people make do and get by. If there is a disaster, and Y2K is as bad as the pundits say it will be, we'll come out of it okay. Maybe a little hungry and a little cold, but we'll get through it. (Personally, I plan to be in Hawaii at a bar with my significant other around New Year's, so I get at least a five-hour jump on the fall of western civilization - yipee!)

Enough of that. On to things that aren't long enough to be paragraphs in their own right (okay, well, they are long enough, I'm just too lazy to put them all together):

• The Tear-My-Hair-Out award of the week goes to Elizabeth Corday for her incompetant use of a bag-valve mask. Those things deliver, at a maximum, 1600 mL of air per squeeze, and you have to give it a good, hard squeeze to get that much. I watched this wonderful surgeon sit there and deliver maybe a tenth of that by indenting the bag just slightly while talking with Romano in recovery (or surgical ICU, wherever they were), and wanted to reach into the TV and smack her. "No, you bag like this!" (deep, rhythmic squeezes)
• Carter warmed his 'scope before examining Perfume Woman (I'm sorry, I don't have my tape with me, so I can't go back and get names) - nice touch. One of my favourite rules of medicine:
  When examining a patient,
  • Warm your hands,
  • warm your stethoscope,
  • and especially warm the speculum.
• What was with the ED doors? Oh, those scwewy witers - they invent an automatic door that doesn't have a "push in case of emergency" release system. Question to people out there: have you ever seen automatic doors that didn't have some kind of emergency force mechanism? I haven't.
• I've mentioned this before, and it bears mentioning again: unrestricted access to patient care areas in a hospital is a Bad Thing. We saw two examples of this - one was that sicko roaming the hospital unchecked, and the other was Roxanne selling insurance (or mutual funds, or stocks, or whatever) to patients. A hospital is a place for sick people to get better; it is not a place to hawk products on a captive audience. (Although given the trend to put things like McDonald's and Subway into hospitals for staffers, I can only wonder..)
• Bad cardiac care. This one is long enough to make into its own paragraph.

In the same vein, I'm amused by an emergency department that has enough defibrillators to pass them out to other areas in the hospital. I mean, geeze, we've got one, maybe two on a good day. Heaven help us if we try to run two codes at once.

And, oh yes -- those links I mentioned in the newsgroup:

• ECG Interpretation for Dummies.
• The emergency medicine textbook at the Virtual Hospital.
• A good introduction to ACLS.