Mods: While this question arose from watching an episode of ER, my actual query has less to do with the television show and more to do with medical practice, which is why I’ve placed it in GQ. If this is incorrect, please shove me off to the Café.
Scenario: A woman comes into the ER due to anaphylactic shock (due to a fish allergy, I believe). During her treatment, she begins to vomit blood. One of the doctors attending asks the woman’s husband if the patient is an alcoholic, and he eventually admits this is true. “Get the mask!” the doctor shouts, and they proceed to put what appears to be an athletic (hockey?) mask over the woman’s face. She stops vomitting and appears to be fine almost immediately.
WTF? Can someone explain what happened here and/or why this is a viable medical treatment? I am utterly clueless.
Additionally, a friend once related this episode to me, and I truly thought he was making it up, but I caught it as a rerun sometime this month. For the record, the episode is titled “Make of Two Hearts,” #116, and originally aired February 9, 1995.
Many thanks for making some sense out of this for me.
I didn’t see the episode, but it sounds like they might have either used a resuscitation mask to do artificial respirations yet keep the rescue breather person safe from body fluid exposure, or possibly they used an esophageal obturator, a mask with a tube into the esophagus, which inflates, and keeps vomit in the stomach, and protects the airway.
These are wild-ass guesses because I don’t know what went on in the episode.
I’ve seen that one.
She was an alcoholic and had esophageal varices, basically ruptured blood vessels in the esophagus, a consequence of cirrohsis of the liver I think. It doesn’t take long for a person to bleed out that way and one way the doctors try to stop it is to inflate a balloon in the throat. Sometimes they inject a drug directly into the varices as well. Working at a VA hospital I see this a lot.
Not uncommon for alcoholics to get bleeding from blood vessels around the espohagus. These tend to tear (Mallory-Weiss tears) after profuse vomiting, but one can also get bleeding from the stomach with alcoholic gastritis.
Wow. Thanks so much, dwyr and Dr Paprika, for solving this medical mystery for me.
I was going to add a post after dwyr’s asking about the significance of the catcher’s mask, but with the addition of the “Blakemore tube” vocabulary, I was able to find a Web site that explained that some hospitals use football helmets for traction/tension.
For anyone who cares, the Web sites that mention the football helmets are:
