Welcome to Gaia! ::

Do you need to find out how an injury would affect your characters?

Want to know what it's like inside an Emergency Room, what the interior of an operating room looks like, what kind of treatments you'd get in an ICU or how long an injured character would have to spend in hospital?

Got a question about modern medicine, drugs, or medical treatments?

Here's where you can come to ask.

In a former life (and please forgive my fanciful phrasing) I was a student nurse. I may not have quite qualified, but my training has left me a Fount of Useless Medical Trivia. More to the point, I'm a med nerd. I actually like looking up information on healthcare and its history, and, more to the point, I know where to go to look for it. I can also speak Doctor pretty well. That said, I won't pretend I know everything or am any substitute for talking to someone who actually works in the field. I can't answer every single medical question you may have off the top of my head and if you have access to a friend or relative who works in healthcare, I'd reccomend talking to them before talking to me. I won't claim to be infallible, but I'm assured by the friends who come to me for advice on writing hospital scenes that I know enough for my knowledge to be useful to someone else.

Most of my knowledge relates specifically to the English medical system and English treatments, but I'm assured that things aren't all that different throughout the Western medical establishment. I'm not the one to ask about things like hospital bills or how much an ambulance ride will set you back - and I'm certainly not the one to ask where it comes to high fantasy featuring non-human characters - but I can tell you what the inside of an ambulance looks like and what it's like to ride in one.

I'm not online every day, but I will endeavor to check this thread regularly and to get back to any queries in a timely and helpful fashion.


When asking questions, please...

... include as much relevant information as you can. If, for instance, you wish to know about recovery time from an injury, good information to include would be some estimation of the age of the character, the condition of their health before they were injured, and the location and severity of their injury. The more specific you can be about what you wish to know, the easier I will find it to give you the help you need. Medicine is not always a terribly precise science and what holds true for one character might not work for another.

... if it's relevant to your query, give me some idea of what location, time period and universe your story is set in. If I'm not told otherwise I'm going to presume that the story is set in the present day, in the Western world, and give advice accordingly.

... bear in mind that my training (tho' abortive) was specifically geared toward hospital nursing. I had a few classes on genetics and I enjoy reading popular science books, but I am not, for instance, the best person in the world to ask about the more theoretical side of medicine. If I can help at all I will certainly try to, but while I'll do my level best to provide answers to any questions that touch on subjects like forensics or genetics, I'm not really speaking from experience there.

... remember that the advice I give on this thread is for fictional characters only. It is not meant to be considered in any way, shape or form an expert medical opinion, and is certainly no substitute for a doctor's visit. I am perfectly happy to help people to write convincing hospital scenes, but far less so with giving actual medical advice. I am not a qualified nurse and it would be irresponsible of me to try and tell anybody how best to manage their own health. Genuine medical problems require genuine medical professionals.


I would prefer it if questions were asked on this thread so anyone else who might be interested could read them, and anyone else who could contribute could do so. If, however, you have a question you feel really uncomfortable asking in public, please PM me.

Feyre:

That's either a CT scanner or an MRI scanner. They both look like large circular structures in which the patient lies on a flat bed while having parts of their bodies scanned. A CT scanner is comparatively small and quiet. An MRI scanner is bigger and noisier - patients in an MRI have to wear ear defenders while in the scanner, and often have music piped into them at the same time. A full MRI scan also takes a very long time - upwards of an hour - unlike a CT scan, which is finished in minutes once the patient is set up. A CT scan could be done in an emergency situation; an MRI would only be performed on a patient whose condition was stable.

CT and MRI imaging can be used to scan any part of the body, not just the brain, and they're used because they can show details of the soft tissues - organs, muscles, and blood vessels, if the patient has radioactive dye (with a very short half-life) injected into their veins, unlike X-rays which can only show bones or metal plates. It's also worth knowing that patients who have metal in their bodies cannot have MRIs, as it relies on strong magnets - so strong that any metal implants would be affected. I'm pretty sure it's a similar rule for a CT scan.

As for the 'former life' thing, that's just me being a little fanciful. I'm not the reincarnation of a one-time nursing student; I was a one-time nursing student myself a little while back.

Moyayuki:

The real problem with spinal cord damage is that it's something that (to my knowledge) is rather difficult to deal out in half measures. Nerves are, if I recall correctly, rather an all-or-nothing kind of thing - nerve impulses either aren't there or they're fully there, meaning that either they work properly or they don't work at all. While it's possible for spinal injury to be incomplete (more on this later) you can't really have a nerve that only kind of works. Either it works or it doesn't - it's all to do with the way nerve impulses are conducted.

The degree of dysfunction a patient with a spinal injurty suffers is related to a large extent to whereabouts he or she is injured. The spinal cord being severed at any level would result in disability; the higher up the spine was damaged, the more functionality is lost. If you wished him to suffer a complete break of the spinal cord, my suggestion is that it happen in the lumbar region of the back. This wouldn;t necessarily prevent him from walking, and would allow him enough upper body function to retain a degree of independence. There's a bit more information on it here which might be useful. You would definitely want to avoid anything much higher up the spine, though, as that would leave your character seriously disabled and totally dependant on carers.

Yopu could also have your soldier suffer an incomplete spinal injury. There's some basic information on this page if you scroll down a bit; a Google search for Incomplete Spinal Injury also turned up this patient factsheet which might be able to give you a bit more information on incomplete spinal injuries. While he would suffer lower limb weakness and some loss of muscular control, an incomplete break, like an injury in the lumbar region of the spine, would allow for a degree of independence to be maintained.

As for chronic pain - often patients who suffer from serious chronic pain take morphine-based painkillers or opiod analgesics. It is possible to take these by mouth, but they could also be administered by a syringe pump (this is a small, cassette-tape-sized pump containing a little syringe full of an opiod painkiller; these are often sited in the lower limb, and administer the drugs into a patch of fat rather than muscle or vein) or a transdermal patch - similar, I believe, to a nicotine patch. I never saw one of these being used, though I have seen syringe pumps many times.

Hope some of this proved of some help. smile

Moyayuki:

Ah, the spine is divided into regions, as seen on this diagram. There are five spinal regions, and the spinal bones (vertebrae) in each section are named slightly differently in order to draw a distinction between each area of the spine. The lumbar vertebrae, as the diagrams show, are those in region three, in the lower back. Injury to vertebrae any higher than that would as I said result in far more serious injury - it's all to do with the way the nerves to the body radiate out from the spine - which is why I suggest injuring this poor soldier of yours in the lumbar (lower back) region.

... aah, seems like no matter how hard I try to avoid jargon it creeps in anyway. redface

Wow, that thing is huge, hmm, I need to change a few things, is it common to have both machines in the same room, and are those machines sometimes present in (pathological) mental hospitals?

I definitely need the quality of the pictures as good as possible, so I am sticking with the MRI


If I had the luxury of choice I'd go with mutation before birth, however my story needs mutations of grown people, I had thought about having cells revert to stem cells to facilitate the mutations, I think I should do some research on butterflies, see how they develop, unfortunately I can't have the subjects be in coma or dead for more than a few hours.

The whole idea is that it is all theoretically possible, bar our current knowledge of such things. I hope to tie it in with new developments in stem cell research. I want to have something interesting, yet not tedious, and somehow compile it into a horror story, kind of a la Star Trek, except darker.

Coincidentally, do you know if any mental hospitals are still located in late nineteenth century buildings?

Much obliged at your attention.