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s/v Bright Water

Tag Archives: Pneumothorax

Hueso roca revisited.

26 Wednesday Dec 2012

Posted by svbrightwater in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Broken Bones, First Aid, Medical, Pneumothorax, ribs

P1010180

First of all, I doubt that “Hueso roca” is the correct way to say “broken bone” in Espanol, but it worked, and both the admitting nurse and the doctor figured out what I was talking about.

Second through sixth of all, both Nancy and I have had a lot of first aid classes and know quite a few doctors and nurses and have worked with medical issues using technology and software, but when we did the right thing we did it for all the wrong reasons.

Lessons learned:
2)  While a punctured lung can be a dangerous effect from a broken rib, the danger is not passed if you don’t cough up blood right away.
3)  A real danger from a punctured lung is a pnuemothorax (from pneuma (air) and thorax (the middle part of a grasshopper), therefore literally “The grasshopper flies from the middle.”)  You get a pnuemothorax from your lung leaking into your chest.  The air in your chest cavity pushes your lung all the way across your chest until it collapses both lungs and makes your heart not work anymore.  It can take twelve hours or so or more to develop a pneumothorax, and it shows as shortness of breath first.  While the chest X-Ray was useless for the broken bone part, it would show if my right lung was on my left side.
4)  While there are field treatments for pneumothorax, it’s better to find a doctor to do them.  There will be blood, and Doctors have probably seen a film strip on the procedure.
5)  Another common danger from a broken rib is pneumonia (from pneuma (air) and Mony (Mutual of New York), therefore literally “Banker’s Breath.”)  In order to not get pneumonia, you need to take 20 deep breaths at the end of every hour to keep the alveola inflated and not full of fluid.  You don’t need to take the deep breaths if it hurts too much, or if there’s inter-bonular grinding or anything, but you want to take the deep breaths.
6)  Everybody, including us and the doctor that saw us, thought we should maybe wrap my chest with a big wide Ace bandage.  That’s so yesterday afternoon.  If you do that you get banker’s breath.  The Ace bandage is good for flail chest, which is completely unrelated to my kind of broken rib except for the broken rib part.

So we did the right thing by immediately making way for the medico, but we did it for the wrong reasons.

My rib is mostly fine now.  It wakes me up a little and I’m afraid of hurting it again, but I do mostly what I want.  It’s still hideous looking and will probably take a few years to re-mould back into something that birds won’t perch on, but it’s fine.

It’s probably worth pointing out that, if you are getting a chest X-Ray, you should stand up straight.  Posture is everything in this world.

Anyone who trusts first aid or medical aid they got from a sailing blog is an idiot.  Don’t be one of those.  That’s our job.

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So we’ll take it easy now…

29 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by svbrightwater in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Broken bone, ice pack, Pneumothorax, Rib

Our 66 pound anchor was stuck in the anchor roller.  Weird, and substantial due to the awesome force of our massive Le Tigre anchor winch.

So I leaned over the one-inch diameter pulpit rail and pushed on the anchor fluke.  Nothing.  Pushed a little harder.  Nothing.  Pushed one more time.  Clunk snap crash.

Clunk was the anchor un-wedging from the roller housing.  Crash was the anchor dropping three feet before the chain came tight.

Snap was the pulpit rail wedging between my ribs and snapping one of them.  It was a fairly clear noise.  Not a lot of ambiguity.

We immediately cleared the deck and headed for La Paz, 85 miles away.  At six to seven knots, that’s, umm, quite a while.  We got out the first aid books and treated me for shock and reviewed the boat procedures and lined up medical supplies and iced the area.  It scared the crap out of us.

Once I didn’t start coughing up blood or passing out, it got boring.  Still scary and painful, but boring.

This is what a normally too skinny rib cage looks like.

This is the right side with the more interesting but hideous hole/bump malformation.

Here in Baja we use frozen sushi-grade tuna for rib ice-packs.  It’s traditional.  Cheaper chicken freezes too hard and hurts.  Good thing I had my Kindle.  I finished the Sherlock Holmes collection.

At least the moon was pretty.  Must be a harvest moon, heh?  We docked in La Paz at 11 pm.

This morning the La Paz medico looked as this pretty picture and declared me healthy but sore.  Since you can’t even see the front ribs I’m a little unclear on his criteria.  However, I’m pretty sure the break, if it does exist, is just a crack.  I can feel it grind if I move around too much.  Must be my imagination.

So Nancy gets to do all the heavy lifting for a while.  Good thing her back is good.

 

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