CPR

SCVECCS is the Student Veterinary Emergency and Critical Care Society, and they have lots of interesting seminars and workshops. Recently I went to a CPR lab.

I've taken human CPR courses before, and chances aren't bad that so have you. I remember having the fake chest and practice defibrillator. Well, this wasn't like that. It was in the wet lab, which is a room kind of like a mini-version of the anatomy lab and all sorts of stuff goes on in there. There were two groups, I was in the second, and the first group went more than an hour over time. When we finally went in, they were still trying to finish up, and the first thing I saw was a room full of vet students sticking needles and tubes into the dead sheep that were sprawled everywhere. They were dirty and bloody and the room smelled rather like blood and sheep, as you might expect. I did actually find it pretty unpleasant at first, but as soon as we started doing stuff it improved a lot, since focusing on the techniques precluded focusing on how disturbing a few of the sheep were.

There were four stations.

• The first one my group did was intubation, which is sticking a tube down the trachea so the patient can breathe. This is supposedly quite difficult in sheep, and the demonstrator took a long time trying to get it in. When it was our turn, one guy started off on that sheep, so I went over to the second sheep. It was really easy and took like a second for me and the person with me. One cool part is the scope that you stick down their throat; it not only holds down the tongue and other structures out of the way, but has a light on the end so you can see.
• Warning possibly disturbing mental image: the sheep for this one were cut along their cheeks like the Joker from the Dark Knight so we could open their mouths better, since they were in rigour mortis. You can imagine why I thought it was a little creepy at first, when one of the first things I saw upon entering the room was bloody dead Joker sheep.

• The next was putting catheters into veins. This is slightly more difficult in dead animals, as they have no blood pressure. Anyway, there are three main sites you can try (jugular, cephalic, and saphenous veins), and we stuck them all. Maybe. It was kind of hard to tell.

• The third involved drawing blood, and instead of sheep they had rubber dog heads. These things are ancient and full of holes because they've been jabbed so many times, and the tubes inside representing the veins are so leaky we couldn't actually get water out like we were supposed to. They also showed us the crash cart and cave us a little description of what was inside.

• The last station was doing actual chest compressions. There were some more dead sheep, but also an awesome stuffed dog. It was black and long-haired, had a zipper up its belly, and looked kind of like cookie monster with teeth. Unlike humans, you have the animals on their side rather than their back. On really small animals, you can even just use your thumb and fingers to squeeze their chest. Also since they're animals, you have to aim for 100-120 beats per minute, so pretty quick.

Despite all the effort and technique involved in CPR, they told us the recovery rate is 5%. That's counting patients that arrest during anaesthesia. If you only count patients that come in (say, hit by a car), it's down to 1%. Makes it seem a little futile.