Cool Dummies

I've been studying and cramming for the past few days for my Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) certification...and I passed. Hooray! ACLS was a two-day course where we had to demonstrate proficiency in treating/reviving a patient during cardiac arrest. The most unnerving part of the course was when I had to be team leader. I had 5 people in my team: one for CPR, one for oxygenation, one for IV meds, one for defibrillation (shocking the patient), and one as my recorder. I had to direct my team on what to do, at the same time, try to figure out why my patient's on the way to being dead. We had a dummy as our patient; it was so realistic, it was easy to forget it's fake. It/He had IV access on his arms, chest rise when we oxygenate (even a collapsed lung if the instructor programs it), changing heart rhythm on the monitor...you can even visualize the vocal cords if you decide to intubate it/him! This dummy we could also shock, so we were playing with live electricity (360 Joules! Yikes!). The instructor was saying that even just a piece of your clothing touching the patient's bed could shock you as well. You bet we were all shouting "Shocking in three! One: I'm clear, Two: you're clear, Three: Everybody's clear!" during the simulated cardiac arrest.

One of my coworkers said she attended a class somewhere in Texas where they had a dummy that could ooze cerebrospinal fluid out of the ears, tears come out of the eyes, frothy stuff coming out of the mouth, or blood-like fluid coming out of any orifice. That must be one super expensive dummy. Another good one I've seen was in school. We had a pregnant dummy that actually gives birth. Baby comes with a long umbilical cord still attached to the placenta. Super cool!

I'm guessing that the take-away message here is that it's better to practice on life-like dummies than to practice on real people. Training facilities will spend as much as they could to obtain super cool dummies so we could make our mistakes on dummies that won't sue. That, right there, makes a whole lot of sense.

-posted by tanya-