Surgery

From HaloStation Wiki
Revision as of 17:57, 15 October 2019 by Cdr Riley (talk | contribs) (Created page with " === The preparation process === Are you sure you've got your scanner printout handy, all medications administered, all other conditions dealt with, and all necessary personne...")
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

The preparation process

Are you sure you've got your scanner printout handy, all medications administered, all other conditions dealt with, and all necessary personnel ready to go?

  1. Find a suitable operating table unless you're willing to risk ghetto surgery
  2. Make sure you're wearing latex gloves and a Sterile mask
  3. Ask the person to strip, or click+drag them onto your body and manually remove their clothing.
  4. Grab the person and click on the operating table to lay them down on it.
  5. Check the operating computer to ensure the patient is positioned properly. If the monitor does not show the patient's vitals, the surgery will not work.
  6. Anesthetize the patient.
  7. Be sure that the patient is asleep.
  8. Make sure you're set on the Help intent.
  9. Use a sink to wash your hands.

Anesthesia

Operating on people who are awake is kind of difficult. They tend to scream and squirm around a lot. It's technically possible to complete surgery on someone who's awake, but you're best off restraining them if that's the case, and the patient is likely to have their heart stop from the sheer agony of it unless they're high as a kite on painkillers.

Ideally, you want the patient to be asleep and unresponsive before shoving your hands into their rib cage. As such, you'll need to apply anesthesia. There are two main types of anesthesia available on board the SEV Torch: suppressors and injected. Using inhaled anesthesia is not recommended. The main source of anesthesia is via breathink Mask

The other option is injected anesthesia. The NanoMed Plus vendor in the Medbays contains bottles of Soporific. Fill up a syringe and pump your patient full. It'll take a while to fully knock them out (so be sure to keep looking at them with Shift + Click so that you know when they finally do conk off), but it'll last a while. There's no quick way to bring them out of this coma, unless you want to pump them full of Dylovene to counteract the soporific.

Soporific relies on your patient having a functioning organ, in this case, the heart. A small amount of chemicals will still be absorbed even if the heart is not pumping, but not a meaningful amount. Either way, if the heart is not pumping, soporific is not circulating. Then again, neither is anything else, so your patient is unlikely to be awake anyway. If for some reason they are, and their lungs also aren't working, then they're shit outta luck. Pump 'em full' of painkillers and pray they don't fight back, 'cause if both the lungs and heart are out, you haven't got time to waste.

Infection

If you fail to properly prep for surgery (don't wash your hands, don't wear sterile gloves, and so on) you run the risk of giving your patient an infection. This can be very dangerous if allowed to progress and should be treated promptly by applying Ointment to the affected area. If the infection is particularly advanced, consider dosing the patient with Spaceacillin.

If you're not sure whether or not you prepped properly, better safe than sorry. Slap some ointment down on that healing incision once you've finished with the operation.

A few final notes

Be sure that your patient doesn't have Bicaridine or Tricordrazine in their system before beginning surgery. These medications will close any incisions you make, rendering surgery impossible. In the same way, do not apply gauze to a patient while surgery is in progress, or you will close the incision and force yourself to start over. Advanced trauma kits will do the same thing, but there are a few surgeries that require you to use them. Doing that at the right time in the surgery won't close the incision. Just make sure you're following the instructions correctly.

You may also want to read the How to help section for a few notes on keeping patients alive on the table.

When performing multiple surgeries on different body parts, it can be useful for speed to use the body-part selection hotkeys on your numpad by pressing the numbers corresponding in position to the body-part you wish to operate on. Double-press for secondary parts of that body-part, such as the hands or eyes.

As a final note, if for whatever reason, you are operating on a patient with no limbs, you will not be able to use the circular saw to open the rib cage or skull. It will assume that you are trying to amputate. This renders most surgery on limbless patients impossible; either stabilize them and attach new limbs, or just saw off the head and transfer them to a cyborg body.

List of operations

Performing a surgery itself is simple. Target the appropriate limb or part of the body, make sure you're on Help intent and click on the patient with the appropriate surgical tool in your hand. You'll then have to wait for a short period while the action completes. During this time, you can't do anything but talk, or your hand will slip and you'll hurt the patient. Once the action is completed, click on them again with the next appropriate tool in hand. Rinse and repeat until the surgery is complete.

If you're not actually performing the surgery, but are just assisting the surgeon with things like medicating the patient and keeping the IV going, see the section on How to help. Template:Note

Standard steps

Most surgeries follow a very basic pattern:

  1. Make an incision.
  2. [CHEST OR HEAD] Open the skull or rib cage.
  3. Perform the operation.
  4. [CHEST OR HEAD] Repair the skull or rib cage.
  5. Close the incision.

Learning this basic pattern will make most surgery extremely simple, but be warned that not every surgery follows this pattern. Be sure to read the full instructions in order to avoid hurting a patient!