There is a scene in Terminator 2 in which Miles Dyson, bleeding profusely after having been shot several times, is holding a heavy weight above a detonator trigger button with the intent of triggering the explosion when he is no longer able to hold up the weight. He is hyperventilating during the entire scene, up until his last gasp when he drops the weight and triggers the explosion.
Years ago a med student friend of mine praised this scene as being medically accurate and explained what was going on with the hyperventilation, but I can’t remember what he said.
So what was the deal? Why was he hyperventilating?
There are a ton of settings in which someone might hyperventilate - including trauma, infections, body cavity fluid accumiulations, psychiatric disorders etc. You could conceivably have had most of the characters in that movie hyperventilate and be “medically accurate”.
I always thought it was ludicrous to expect someone who was mortally injured to be able to hold up a heavy weight in that manner right up until the point he croaked.
That may be true, but under these specific circumstances - in which a man in a sitting position has very recently suffered a number of thoracic gunshot wounds and is attempting to hold a ~20-pound weight at chest level a foot or so from his body - what are the likely physiological mechanisms/phenomena that could plausibly compel him to hyperventilate?
I’m thinking heavy blood loss has reduced oxygen carrying capacity so he’s actually going into oxygen debt from the effort of holding the weight thus increasing his respiratory rate.
I would imagine he’s in extreme pain.
Couple that with increasing weakness as his body shuts down.
Of course he’s going to hold it right up until the point where he croaked. His croaking couldn’t have preceded his dropping it by more than a fraction of a second, nor could it have been longer than a fraction of a second after he dropped it. It’s quite possible that his death was the proximate effect, rather than the cause, of the dropping, but in his condition, he probably didn’t consider that a matter worth worrying about, as it wasn’t likely that he could have made it out of there alive in any event.
Much more likely he would have lost consciousness and thus dropped the weight at least several minutes before he would have died (explosive death excluded).
It was just a standard claymore detonator. He was treating it as a deadman switch by holding a heavy weight over it, but it wasn’t a standard dead man’s switch.
I’m guessing he figured if he made such an attempt, then Dyson might just go ahead and purposely slam down the weight to trigger the explosion. So it’s not a sure thing that he could succeed in knocking Dyson’s arm aside. He might even inadvertently cause the weight to drop on the trigger if he swiped Dyson’s arm. Too risky weighed against the lives of his men.
By the way, is that Dean Norris? I haven’t seen T2 in a long time.
Is there even such a thing as a “standard dead man’s switch”? Every account I’ve ever seen of one has it being jerry-rigged by a protagonist finding himself unexpectedly forced into the role of hero.
If you mean something used to prevent someone else from shooting you, probably not. But sure, there are plenty of switches that require continuous effort to hold closed, in order to make sure an operator or attendant is still alive/awake/present/paying attention. You see them all the time at amusement parks & carnivals - a big orange pedal the operator has to hold down or the ride will stop.
I am not a bombmaker, but dead man switches are portrayed in different ways in movies and TV. Some are spring-loaded where the switch must be held closed by the trigger man. If he dies or is otherwise incapacitated, he lets go and the switch triggers the bomb. Fancier versions use a device that detects the wearer’s pulse–so a more literal ‘dead man’s’ switch.
Most lawnmowers have this feature. If you don’t hold down a bar on the handle the engine will automatically turn off. Obviously it’s not because they’re worried about gardeners dropping dead and want to make sure the device turns itself off neatly afterwards. It’s so you can’t walk away from the lawnmower and leave it running. And also so you have to keep at least one hand on the handle, which makes it hard to stick your other hand in places where it shouldn’t be stuck.
Locomotives have a deadman switch, the operator is suppose to keep his foot on a pedal. This is to prevent a run away train in case said operator is disabled.
There is a movie where a bad man is seen placing a toolbox on the pedal.
:smack: Yeah, I used to work in an amusement park, and was quite familiar with those pedals. I shouldn’t have been thinking so literally-- They weren’t meant to stop the ride if I died; they were meant to stop it if I had to run to stop a kid doing something unsafe. But yes, it’s the same concept.
