Always Follow Directions

Ric’s lecture this afternoon was all about anesthesia machines and what can go wrong with them. For some reason, anesthesia machines collect the combination of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and anesthetic agent exhaled by the patient and attempt to scrub and sequester the harmful components of the gas before releasing them into the room for everyone else to breathe. On more than one occasion, Ric has witnessed surgeons and nurses becoming dangerously tired because scavenger gas filtration was “full” and “spilling over” so to speak. Also, there is no way to know when the scrubbers become saturated other than to notice the anesthetizing effects on people other than the patient. For these reasons combined with common sense, Ric recommends sending the exhaled gas outside where no one will be harmed. He then cautioned, “Don’t return a machine as being fixed that might still be broken, or it may bring you to jail as the biomed.” Luckily (kind of), he followed that up by saying, “Well, nevermind. It’s fine. The anesthesiologist should know if the machine is working; he’ll go to jail. Just don’t ever sign anything to certify that a machine is repaired and you won’t be too mixed up in it.”

Our lab project today was “dry”, that is, involving no building or troubleshooting work. Instead, we focused on creating quick-start guides for teaching anyone a new task. Quick-start guides are similar to what we find in the instructions of most products, teaching us as clearly as possible but with the minimum number of words how to use a product properly. My group of four chose to create a guide for tying a bow-line knot, meaning that the pictures were somewhat difficult to draw. Luckily, since I was obsessed as a young child with depicting the spatial relations of snakes wrapped around tree trunks, I was able to draw the rope positions relatively quickly. We then gave our quick-start guide to a volunteer whom we were not allowed to communicate with, and he successfully tied the knot! One group made a guide for a cootie-catcher and asked who in the room had never made one before—I was the only one. After I struggled through that, the day was done (We had also earlier discussed at length the conditions we’re likely to face in a developing world hospital).

Back at the homestay, I took a more relaxed evening, since I worked extra on homework last night. Tomorrow, I have to give a presentation in Spanish class about the purpose of the ventilator, how it works, what could go wrong with it, and how to fix it. Although the presentation, followed by a question-and-answer session, must be entirely in Spanish, I’m more concerned with the fact that Ric, the biomedical technology specialist, is in my Spanish class!!