I didn't really notice this the first time I watched All in the Family, but Weaver intubated Lucy at first while Dave was standing there saying something like "You doing okay, chief?" but later they had to put a trach (?) tube in her neck and there was no tube in her throat anymore. So why did they have to trach her if she had already been intubated?

Also what does "spin a crit" and "v-tach" mean?

-- Melanie (msintn@hotmail.com), June 30, 2000

Answers

i am not a doctor, although i want to be so i am not positive about this. Weaver had to have a trach put in because Lucy had a laceration to her trachea. Probably, it was below where the Endotracheal tube had ended in lucy's throat, so all the air that was being pumped into lucy was escaping through the hole in her trachea. therefore, a trach was needed to deliver oxygen to the lungs. i believe when putting a trach in it is done below the vocal cords and it would be below the laceration. V-tach is short for ventricular tachycardia, which means that the ventricles, which are the chambers of the heart that pump blood to the lungs(right ventricle) or the rest of the body (left ventricle, are pumping blood too fast. Crit is short for hematocrit, which is "Relative volume of blood occupied by erythrocytes(red blood cells) . An average figure for humans is 45ml per cent, i.e. A packed red cell volume of 45ml in 100ml of blood." (this was taken from the online medical dictionary, http://www.graylab.ac.uk/cgi-bin/omd?query=haematocrit&action=Search+O MD They would have taken some of lucy's blood and put it in a machine called a centtrifuge. This spins the blood sample really fast and separates the blood into two parts--the liquid plasma and the cells, both white and red. red blood cells are those that carry oxygen, so i believe a low crit is dangerous because there is decreased ability of the blood to carry oxygen to the cells. The online medical dictionary, http://www.graylab.ac.uk/cgi-bin/omd is good for figuring out what some of the medical terms are. i hope i was correct on all of this...aren't medicine and the human body fascinating?

-- Erin (earthgirl24@yahoo.com), June 30, 2000.

Thanks for answering that, Erin! It's all very interesting. I love to watch all the medical shows on TV even though I don't work in that field. I think I might have learned some of that in Anatomy/Physiology class in high school, but I've forgotten half of it by now!

-- Melanie (msintn@hotmail.com), June 30, 2000.

Erin - I'm a former medical technologist (ie. I used to spin crits), and your description of a spun crit was right on!

-- Beth (Bsmith@internet-95.com), July 01, 2000.