Yeah, and one key thing is that a defibrillator isn't something you use willy-nilly on anyone having a heart attack, etc. There are very specific conditions that must be met for a defibrillator to have a positive impact. You can easily do more harm than good with one. Thankfully, technology is here to help.
I was at a first-aid course a while back, and modern defibrillators have a built-in mechanism that first scans the person's heartbeat for patterns and tells you whether a shock is recommended or not.
So now, whenever I see movies where paramedics just casually zap people with two metal plates without any pre-diagnosis looks ridiculous.
(Yes, I became a qualified expert after a single 1-hour course. That's how life works, right?)
I took that course, too! Only our course was like 4 hours. I feel like a PhD in shocking hearts.
Naw, but the big thing we picked up on was that CPR pretty much never works, but defibrillators most definitely do (but under the right circumstances, as you point out).
Another thing: "Staying Alive" is what you should hum (hopefully inside your head) while doing chest compressions to maintain the right rhythm for the heartbeat.
In my last CPR class, it was recommended to sing “Baby Shark” 🦈 doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo! (Because everyone else in the group was well under 30 and didn’t know “Stayin’ Alive” 🫣
Thanks for the write-up, Andrew. I'm afraid I have had a number of those shocks, including now from a built-in pacemaker-defibrilator. My personal experience with the electric shocks has not exactly been fun, but they have worked so far.
Thanks for sharing this, Melvin. If you want to share more thoughts, I'm all ears here. Pacemaker-defibrillators are just plain amazing, and I'm very glad they exist. It's one more way we humans are facing down our mortality and stretching it out just a bit longer (or a lot longer in some cases), and I'm all for it.
Also: I think many more of us will live with machines in our bodies, and probably in the nearer future than most imagine.
my dad had a messed up valve - the big one - so they replaced it with a pig valve. Open heart surgery. Terrifying shit; rockstar doc said it'd last 10 years. It lasted 20 - every year my dad would go check on it and come back with stuff that sounded like plumbing notes - pressure, leakage, etc. When it started to fail they said they had to go in again and I thought that'd be the end of him (he was in his 90's!) but his cardiologist talked me into it. I was amazed they pulled it off with little tubes (arthroscopic) and some crazy medical miracle device that patched it like Ms Rizzle with a glue gun on a drive by in her magic school bus. Afterwards I told the surgeon I couldn't believe he pulled it off and he was not displeased with my lack of confidence in the medical establishment.
every dayum day I learn something new here so yeah good job! I find all this talk of hearts and shocking terrifying. I did not know about this stopping thing but I got super tight with my dad's cardiologist and I do know hearts are the main way we die.
Hearts are so, so interesting. I've kind of left them on the back burner in favor of the brain, spending much more time thinking about how that organ works, but the heart is an absolute wonder, and I want to think about it a lot more over the next few years.
There are cases (such as a bundle branch block) where the electrical signal has to take an alternate route to beat the heart. It cannot be heard with a stethoscope, however it will show up on an EKG.
I was a nurse and have been part of a cardiac team, and we used a defibrillator. Usually it is the doctor who uses it. The patient has to have a heart rhythm in order to ‘reset’ it, so I love seeing a movie showing a patient with a flat ECG (EKG) and being defibrillated- that won’t work.
Yeah, and one key thing is that a defibrillator isn't something you use willy-nilly on anyone having a heart attack, etc. There are very specific conditions that must be met for a defibrillator to have a positive impact. You can easily do more harm than good with one. Thankfully, technology is here to help.
I was at a first-aid course a while back, and modern defibrillators have a built-in mechanism that first scans the person's heartbeat for patterns and tells you whether a shock is recommended or not.
So now, whenever I see movies where paramedics just casually zap people with two metal plates without any pre-diagnosis looks ridiculous.
(Yes, I became a qualified expert after a single 1-hour course. That's how life works, right?)
I took that course, too! Only our course was like 4 hours. I feel like a PhD in shocking hearts.
Naw, but the big thing we picked up on was that CPR pretty much never works, but defibrillators most definitely do (but under the right circumstances, as you point out).
Another thing: "Staying Alive" is what you should hum (hopefully inside your head) while doing chest compressions to maintain the right rhythm for the heartbeat.
Oh yes, we joked about this quite a bit. The person leading the course thought she had a pretty crude sense of humor too, until she met us.
I mean, nothing.
You've seen The Office CPR scene, ya?
Ha. I didn't before, but I just looked it up. It's great. All you need to know about first aid in 3 entertaining minutes!
There were like 5 Dwights there for us that day.
In my last CPR class, it was recommended to sing “Baby Shark” 🦈 doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo! (Because everyone else in the group was well under 30 and didn’t know “Stayin’ Alive” 🫣
https://open.spotify.com/track/5ygDXis42ncn6kYG14lEVG?si=sCho9NkmSku4r2g_tvhaZw
Ha, that tracks.
Also, thanks for putting that song back into my head. My kids are now 7+ and 9+, so I thought I was done with "Baby Shark!"
Have you guys seen the show "The Umbrella Academy"? The last season earworms the crap out of this song and gets it stuck in your brain.
Yup. Watched the entire show. The last season was a crazy disjointed mess, so I'm kind of happy they wrapped it up. Still fun though.
You’re welcome 🦈🤣
So in short, you unplug the heart and try turning it on again? 🤣 I know it’s not quite the same, @danielnest didn’t make the joke so I had to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UT8RkSmN4k
EXACTLY.
I do miss the days of blowing into NES cartridges and smacking the TV to get it to work properly.
Thanks for the write-up, Andrew. I'm afraid I have had a number of those shocks, including now from a built-in pacemaker-defibrilator. My personal experience with the electric shocks has not exactly been fun, but they have worked so far.
Thanks for sharing this, Melvin. If you want to share more thoughts, I'm all ears here. Pacemaker-defibrillators are just plain amazing, and I'm very glad they exist. It's one more way we humans are facing down our mortality and stretching it out just a bit longer (or a lot longer in some cases), and I'm all for it.
Also: I think many more of us will live with machines in our bodies, and probably in the nearer future than most imagine.
my dad had a messed up valve - the big one - so they replaced it with a pig valve. Open heart surgery. Terrifying shit; rockstar doc said it'd last 10 years. It lasted 20 - every year my dad would go check on it and come back with stuff that sounded like plumbing notes - pressure, leakage, etc. When it started to fail they said they had to go in again and I thought that'd be the end of him (he was in his 90's!) but his cardiologist talked me into it. I was amazed they pulled it off with little tubes (arthroscopic) and some crazy medical miracle device that patched it like Ms Rizzle with a glue gun on a drive by in her magic school bus. Afterwards I told the surgeon I couldn't believe he pulled it off and he was not displeased with my lack of confidence in the medical establishment.
Truly incredible! That's a great story, and it really is remarkable what we can do when we set our minds to science-ing.
every dayum day I learn something new here so yeah good job! I find all this talk of hearts and shocking terrifying. I did not know about this stopping thing but I got super tight with my dad's cardiologist and I do know hearts are the main way we die.
Hearts are so, so interesting. I've kind of left them on the back burner in favor of the brain, spending much more time thinking about how that organ works, but the heart is an absolute wonder, and I want to think about it a lot more over the next few years.
There are cases (such as a bundle branch block) where the electrical signal has to take an alternate route to beat the heart. It cannot be heard with a stethoscope, however it will show up on an EKG.
Neat. The signal is supposed to go both left and right, but it gets stalled here, right?
Left, right!
I was a nurse and have been part of a cardiac team, and we used a defibrillator. Usually it is the doctor who uses it. The patient has to have a heart rhythm in order to ‘reset’ it, so I love seeing a movie showing a patient with a flat ECG (EKG) and being defibrillated- that won’t work.
Nice. The job of the defibrillator is actually to stop the heart, right? The restarting thing is done by the body, not by the pulse, as far as I know.
The suicide by defibrillator scene in Breaking Bad was memorable. https://youtu.be/0TCbI3BRqw0?si=uZ81wskJUDjHAnMj
Wow, I really need to rewatch that show.