JamieMcGarry - Wheel yourself on down here

[voltaire]

@CannyDan

I don’t know where you (voltaire) get this. Meyer6’s link indicates that these complications occur frequently even when the emergency surgical team is using “all the tools” and all possible professional skills.

A patient with massive trauma including a (likely) crushed chest containing a ruptured aorta doesn’t just have that chest cracked open and the blood vessel sutured up like zipping your fly. Just keeping the patient alive takes significant attention and effort, part of which is clamping that major vessel, otherwise the patient can bleed out in minutes. Getting everything else under enough control to allow for repair of the vessel takes some time. In this case it took so much time that the patient’s nervous system suffered trauma from oxygen deprivation. But we have no reason to believe that the time delay was not completely necessary. Had the clamp not been affixed he would be dead instead of paralyzed.

As I already said, IANADorL and we can only go by what Jamie has told us, but I got it from here:

@jamiemcgarry

I was in a car accident in 2000 at the age of 20. I ruptured my aorta in the car accident. The accident happened in Flint, Mi. and I was helicoptered to Detroit to a hospital renowned for cardiovascular treatment/emergencies. It was the emergency surgery to repair the ruptured aorta that paralyzed me. To treat the aorta (which supplies blood from your heart to the rest of your body) a clamp was placed on the ruptured section, in order to stop the bleeding and sew it back together. Well while that clamp was on, no blood or oxygen was travelling from the point of the clamp on down (including my spinal cord). The safe time limit for an aortic clamp is 30min. Any time exceeding 30min puts the patient at risk for permanent nerve damage. My clamp was on for 62min.
<snip>
*An added wrinkle to this story is I was paralyzed due to malpractice. The surgeon who perfomed the aortic surgery had the option of using equipment which would have artificially kept my blood circulating while the clamp was on my aorta. He didn’t use the equipment, suffering from what I call the “God Complex”. If that machine had been used, I, in all likelihood, would not be paralyzed today. But that is not something I hold onto. My life is my life.