Baghdad Hospital
I’m watching Baghdad Hospital: Inside the Red Zone, an HBO documentary about one of the major trauma centers in Baghdad, where they’ve gone from mainly doing appendectomies to daily shrapnel extractions and penetrating trauma explorations. Their blood bank so frequently runs low that they take a patient’s ID card, and someone must go to the blood bank in the patient’s name and donate blood to get the ID back.
Perhaps the Red Cross or hospital blood banks should use a similar tactic: there’s always a good 100 people (at least) waiting in the surgery waiting room or the ICU waiting area who are visitors or family of a patient. Why not ask them to donate blood? They’re not doing anything else, they get free cookies, and they’ll be repaying the donation someone else made to ensure that blood is available for the next person who needs it. How about it, Mr. Levy? You always seem open to trying new things.
(The film is incredibly depressing, and the images gruesome: children getting bilateral chest tubes and DPLs because they don’t have film for xrays; doctors taken hostage and killed. I can’t imagine the stress of the staff and the patients there.)
How did you get to the point where you have clean, smooth flowing blog entries. It seems –on rereading them–that all of mine are choppy and somewhat disconnected. Did you ever sit down and analyze how other people structure entries, or was it more by osmosis from reading other people’s blogs.
Thanks for the compliment, cstew! I don’t know, it’s just my writing style, I guess. Stream-of-consciousness writing I guess.
Sounds like a decent idea to me…except every time someone passes out from the blood donation, some idiot is going to pull the code button and we’re going to have to do a syncope work-up on them in the ER.
Isn’t a DPL / ICC a lot more expensive than xray film?
The blood bank system you talk about used to be the status quo — at least here in Canada. My mother (83 now) remembers having to round up everyone she knew to donate blood to replace what was needed when a friend had a brain tumour removed. While we do need to encourage more people to donate blood, it strikes me that adding that kind of stress to a family already coping with the health crisis of a loved one is inappropriate. I know that when my father was recently hospitalized for a GI bleed that required 9 units of blood my mother would have been incapable of rallying the troops to donate replacement units.
Thanks for the opinon, CobourgWriter. I don’t think we have to require people to give, but they’re certainly going to be in a more giving frame of mind, I would think.