From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Newsgroups: misc.health.alternative
Subject: Re: Aluminum pans
Date: 19 Sep 1998 00:01:10 GMT

In <6tu1kc$teg$1@strato.ultra.net> wright@nospam.clam (David Wright)
writes:

>In article
><Pine.GSO.3.95qL.980917154633.16520D-100000@konichiwa.cc.columbia.edu>,
>
>>Darnit Dave! You gave away my game. I was hoping a few folks around here
>>would be so excited by my suggestion that they would immediately repair
>>to their plastic tents and start inhaling pure oxygen (I am only sorry
>>that most of the ones I am talking about don't smoke, although in fact
>>they prob. do, given their level of hypocrisy in other matters).
>
>Maybe not; I seem to recall Steve Harris writing about someone on
>oxygen who made the mistake of trying to smoke -- he apparently wound
>up looking like a cartoon character after a bomb goes off in its
>face (blackened, etc).  No permanent injury, however.


   Wasn't in an oxygen tent, though.  The idiot was smoking with nasal
canulae going at high speed, and I suspect he EXHALED high O2 contant
gas around the cigarette.   There's not enough fuel in a cigarette to
cause much damage, but it was (in retrospect, though not at the time),
pretty funny.

    Oxygen tents really were horribly dangerous, inasmuch as you trap a
much larger amount of gas, and it was in the old days in contact with
much larger amount of fuel.  In my hospital also (I didn't see this
one) there was a case during a resuscitation where in the hubub, the
canulae on the patient had gotten down into the bedding, and nobody had
turned the oxygen off.  Toward the end of the code, they attempted to
defibrilate one more time, and a genius intern collegue of mine could
not find the electrolyte paste, and decided to use alcohol wipes
instead.  The lousy conductivity of this, and the alcohol, started a
fire, which with the trapped O2 they had a very hard time getting out.
Patient survived the burns, but it might just as well have gone the
other way.  About the same time, a baby being resuscited in an
incubator did basically get incinerated that way.

                                      Steve Harris, M.D.