McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Help, I'm stuck & need a doctor's advice!

(1/3) > >>

meg_evonne:
I'm really stuck on a technical medical writing delimna.  Is there a doctor in the house or surgical nurse or military service medic or someone you know????

Only on a sci fi board would people understand what I need.  A woman, transformed into large bird is struck by an energy ball under her right wing.  She is in the process of turning back into her more substantial human form to take the hit.  Essentially she gets a baseball size hole burned into the ribs under the arm which would completely shatter & destroy the ribs in that location.  The force of the blast causes a lung to collapse, destroys her spleen, damages a major artery or vein into the heart and leaves her liver pretty much smashed.  I can find research on the soft tissue, but the ribs are proving beyond my internet research.

Can the parts of the rib under the arm just be removed?  Is that leaving enough support for the lung?  If not, I'm assuming that a series of rods and plates might be used to replace the missing sections, at least until they heal--but I can't have metal in a transforming character.  If nothing else, can I use a whale bone or something like the women used to wear in their clothing (stays? I think they were called) in the 1800's? Anything other than metal, you know? 

Like I said I'm stuck... Merck and Mayo have a ton of stuff on fractured ribs, but nothing on sections of ribs that are simply gone in that area...  Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Tasmin21:
My best friend is a doctor (and she's used to acting as my medical consultant for my writing. *grin*) so I'll shoot her the question and see what she says.

meg_evonne:
That would be so GREAT.  Thank you!  Somehow I didn't know how to fit it into my next physical.   :D

Lord Nedd:
Meg,

My wife is a Internal Medicine doctor (whose father is an orthopeadic surgeon).  I posed the question, how do you deal with a destroyed ribs.  Her response was that regrettably, there is no really good response for when the ribs are entirely destroyed.  The patient is likely to die from the other collateral damage around the ribs as well as the inability to breathe due to rib destruction. 

There are no known surgeries for dealing with rib repair.  We typically bind the ribs and hope that they repair.  Ribs need to be able to flex and bend, so long repair rods and their ilk are not a workable solution.  If enough of the fragments of the ribe are intact, you can perhaps hope that they will refuse, but it is likely that the patient will have permanent damage to those ribs so that they are perpetually broken.

That was the quick solution that she gave me before she ran off to go running.  Perhaps someone else will give you a better solution.

Hmm.

-LN

Blaze:
Heya, what tech level is the story?  Where does it take place and are there magical healers, because you are going to have real trouble without a liver.  Tissue matching a lycanthrope might prove, shall we say, impossible? 

It seems obvious that you want the character to live.  If that is a given, let me know.  Then we will deal with all these other issues... 

Oh, and is the doctor a mad scientist?

Bwa ha ha ha...

I mean *hugs*

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page