I've been a bit preoccupied the last few days because on Monday my brother had major surgery. I was worried about how it would go, and of course also worried because in any major surgery there's a very low but non-zero chance that the anesthetic will kill the patient.

So I was particularly  preoccupied all yesterday because I hadn't heard anything. Finally I told the part of me that was worrying, "Shut up. If anything really bad happened, your sister-in-law would have told you by now. So no news is good news."

Today I heard from him, and in fact things went extremely well. He's fine. But he's going to be house-bound for a while until he heals up.

Having people die in surgery for reasons unrelated to the surgery really is very uncommon, but it does happen. Something like 35 years ago here in Portland, a woman who was in surgery for something that should have been routine died on the operating table. It turned out that someone at Airco had filled an oxygen bottle with nitrogen by mistake, and she died of suffocation.

Since then a couple of things have been done nationwide, at great expense, to make sure that never happens again. First, oxygen bottles now have a different connector than any other kind of gas. You can't fill an oxygen bottle with nitrogen now because the nitrogen-fill connector won't fit. And you can't connect a nitrogen bottle where an oxygen bottle should be at the hospital for exactly the same reason. (It probably should always have been like that.)

Second, anesthetic consoles were all redesigned to include an active oxygen detector on the oxygen line, which will sound an audible alarm if there isn't any oxygen in it. And the routine now is for the anesthiologist to actively check the oxygen before putting the patient under.

Airco got its ass sued off for that fuckup, but that didn't bring that woman back to life. I didn't expect that particular problem to happen with my brother, but the little part of my mind which worries about things kept bringing that case to mind. Murphy's Law has killed countless people, and I didn't want my brother to be one of them.

But everything's alright. He's home, and he's fine, and so I am much relieved. I don't have to be preoccupied any longer.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Daily Life at 05:47 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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