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Something similar to the beginning of this article, from the Las Vegas shooting: http://epmonthly.com/article/not-heroes-wear-capes-one-las-vegas-ed-saved-hundr

by zuppy 8y ago

Something similar to the beginning of this article, from the Las Vegas shooting: http://epmonthly.com/article/not-heroes-wear-capes-one-las-vegas-ed-saved-hundreds-lives-worst-mass-shooting-u-s-history/ http://epmonthly.com/article/not-heroes-wear-capes-one-las-v... It's the story of the doctors.

tptacek 8y ago
This piece is incredible; I read it months ago and it's still stuck in my brain.
cafard 8y ago
Amazing. Thank you for posting this.
btown 8y ago
> In preplanning, I knew that as we started to get some of these red tags stabilized, the anesthesiologists and surgeons would start arriving and we could open up more ORs. That’s the first major choke point. I can resuscitate four or five people, but that operating room was going to be the key to stopping the bleeding and saving lives. In a high volume penetrating MCI like this, you really need flow. You need people to get stabilized and into the operating room, not sitting around perseverating about what test to order next. Getting those ORs staffed and opened was my biggest priority. With potentially hundreds of incoming patients, it was going to be a matter of eyeballing patients or feeling for carotid pulses because we didn’t have enough monitors. Everything was 100% clinical judgment. You’re looking at all these patients, and you’re just waiting for them to declare themselves—and then you start to work on them. Wow. It's rare to see someone who can, in a crisis situation, handle both "macro" and "micro" tasks with such foresight and effectiveness. Menes was doing the equivalent of solving a scalability problem - identifying chokepoints, modeling flow, thinking about optimizations in layout of physical bodies, handling morale - all while implementing experimental treatment procedures and making snap judgements about patients' individual statuses. How someone can keep all this loaded in working memory for hours on end is mind-boggling to me. Truly inspirational.

by zuppy 8y ago

tptacek 8y ago

This piece is incredible; I read it months ago and it's still stuck in my brain.

cafard 8y ago

Amazing. Thank you for posting this.

btown 8y ago

> In preplanning, I knew that as we started to get some of these red tags stabilized, the anesthesiologists and surgeons would start arriving and we could open up more ORs. That’s the first major choke point. I can resuscitate four or five people, but that operating room was going to be the key to stopping the bleeding and saving lives. In a high volume penetrating MCI like this, you really need flow. You need people to get stabilized and into the operating room, not sitting around perseverating about what test to order next. Getting those ORs staffed and opened was my biggest priority. With potentially hundreds of incoming patients, it was going to be a matter of eyeballing patients or feeling for carotid pulses because we didn’t have enough monitors. Everything was 100% clinical judgment. You’re looking at all these patients, and you’re just waiting for them to declare themselves—and then you start to work on them. Wow. It's rare to see someone who can, in a crisis situation, handle both "macro" and "micro" tasks with such foresight and effectiveness. Menes was doing the equivalent of solving a scalability problem - identifying chokepoints, modeling flow, thinking about optimizations in layout of physical bodies, handling morale - all while implementing experimental treatment procedures and making snap judgements about patients' individual statuses. How someone can keep all this loaded in working memory for hours on end is mind-boggling to me. Truly inspirational.