Porky Pig

Note: This post has picture of a dead pig, so if that is not you’re thing, you might want to skip this one.

It is definitely getting dark. We saw our first aurora this week. They weren’t hugely impressive, still fairly dim and not much color. They should get better as full dark sets in, and hopefully by then I will have figured out the right settings on my camera. Other than that, it has been another cold week, but it warmed up to about –75F in time for my most recent delivery, and then up to –50F today, which makes it down right balmy right now. This was the first delivery where we really needed to use lights and headlamps, which made for exciting driving.

Trauma team training was a lot of fun this week. Doctor Dale and Heather, our PA, special ordered us a pig out of the berms.

 

Heather and Gus unwrapping our pig

 We used the pig to practice inserting inter-osteous lines. IO’s are like IVs, but instead of inserting the line into a vein, it gets inserted into bone. Usually it is used when there is trouble accessing a vein, so here, where the emergencies we run into are probably going to involve the cold, learning how to do this makes sense.

Finding the bone

Inserting the needle

At the same time, we learned how to spike IV bags.

Jace showing off a successfully spiked IV bag

While part of the trauma team was doing that,  the rest of us practiced doing intubations on a dummy. 

Nasopharyngeal airway

Nasotracheal Intubation

And then, this is a photo of the station that came out with an interesting effect.