Defibrillation

We walked in today to an old man lying on his bed, all prepared for defibrillation.

He had atrial flutter, second most common arrythmia after atrial fibrillation.

As said by my doctor, atrial flutter is more common in old people, usually brought about by organic heart disease (cardiac malformation such as atrial dilatation, valvular diseases etc.)

A doctor provided oxygen to the patient and a nurse administered propofol or what they call, the Jackson drug.

It has milk like appearance.

Propofol is used here as general anasthesia to send the patient into hypnotic state.

Defibrillation is a procedure where you send electric shock into the patient body to correct the arrythmia.

It was a very painful procedure since the voltage makes an excruciating stabbing pain and taken this into account, defibrillation is done when the patient is unconscious.

A patient reportedly needed to be sent to the psychiatric department for few months due to phobia of defibrillator after an excruciating defribillation procedure.

Back to propofol, this drug can cause respiratory arrest in overdosing.

Otherwise it sedative effect is rather transient and patient regain consciousness rapidly.

The defibrilator was put on the chest and the current went through, sending the patient torso in midair for a nick of time before it dropped back onto the bed, his hand rested on it.

It was as fast as a bolt of lightning.

We took turns pumping the oxygen.

The chin must be tilted so that the airway is patent and the mask shall be hold correctly so that no air gets out and all is good as long as the oxygen saturation meter reads above 95%.

The patient woke up as the third person took over pumping the oxygen.

It has been a really good day at the hospital.

And maybe next time we can perform defibrillation ourselves?