The Medical Thread

Thank you kindly.

I also added "certified" bit just to be make the point extra clear.

Oh darn, I got a case of athlete's foot. I have to go see a dermatologist or pharmacist...but man, I'm scared of going there due to my town recently being hit with Corona.

My uncle is a dentist and recently he had to close his hospital for few days due to a Corona infectee visiting there. He was NOT happy about that. On the bright side, he was a bit of a workaholic and he could really use some break anyway. At least, that's what my mom said about him.

Hope this is the right topic for this, but: last day of february is Rare disease day.

Heh, this is amusing.

So I visited a hospital to visit my grandma. Due to COVID 19 containment getting breached, my town is not safe. As such, the hospital had a couple of staff checking body temperature.

One of them measured me and he said along the line of "What on Earth...?" It nearly freaked me out because I thought I finally got infected.

It turned out that it was the other way around. The staff was confused because I had low body temperature. I looked at the chart they wrote, and while almost everyone had body temperature of around 36.2 celcius, mine was 35.3.

Phew. Thought I was a goner there.

Welcome to the club, mate. I, too, bounce around 35.5°C as a baseline.

To find out if it is your average, do regular checks for about a month. You'll soon work out if it is.

There's a downside: people go by the thermometer, not what you say. So, when you hit 37-38°C and are really beginning to feel it, prepare to be called a hypochondriac and ignored. :/

Edited by Euodiachloris on Mar 7th 2020 at 3:20:52 PM

I don't think I ever tried to figure out what my baseline temp. I should check it out.

And yeah, that does sound annoying.

Whatever my baseline temperature is, I have a hard time maintaining it. I'm underweight, so I don't have the natural insulation that I'm supposed to have, so I find myself compensating for its absence with heavy coats, sweaters, and comfy blankets.

To keep coronavirus patients breathing, hospitals are pioneering a little-tested method.: Attaching more than one person to ventilators. It's an experimental technique that is being tried because the flood of coronavirus cases in New York is about to overwhelm the supply of medical machines.

So.

I feel extreme body chill that just won't go away completely, even though I keep drinking hot liquid and wearing multiple layers of clothes, hunkered under blankets.

I'm so darn fatigued that during my dog's walk (literally just walking in circles around my apartment) I felt like collapsing. It wasn't even a particularly strenous walk either.

In addition, even though I don't feel thirst, I constantly feel the need to urinate. Strangely enough, not defecation.

Also strangely, no coughing.

Lastly, I have a mild headache and hard time concentrating.

Yeah, this is something all right.

Not sure if it's COVID or just regular cold/flu/fever/etc, but I ain't taking any chance and gonna give a call to my country's CDC at the earliest possible occasion.

In a typical Chestburster scenario from Alien, a human host would go through rapidly escalating pain before the alien parasitoid finally succeeds in breaking through the host's sturdy ribcage and escape.

... The thing is, the depicted (and officially stated in supplemental lore) placement of the chestburster's exit location is right where the sternum would be, and thus places the heart as an obstacle in the path of the chestburster's "hatching". Now, I don't doubt that the creature can easily chew its away through the heart, or at least bite off enough of the connecting arteries and veins to just shove it aside, but hosts are typically depicted as remaining alive and kicking (and screaming) up until the alien rams through their sternum, after which they seem to have what in video game trope terminology is called Critical Existence Failure (i.e. they almost immediately stop all of their convulsions and screaming, and are treated as dead from that very moment), with the only exception being Ellen Ripley in Alien 3, where she remains alive for a few seconds as she reaches out with her hands, grabs hold of the chestburster that had just rammed out of her chest, and holds it to herself so that it doesn't have any chance of leaping away from the fall to fiery doom that she had already consigned both of them to.

So that brings me to the big question: Realistically, how much time would the human body have between the beginning of the massive hemorraghing that would naturally result from the heart's destruction on the one hand, and the victim ceasing any sort of physical response to said injury (as well as any other injury that they may have already suffered or suffer afterwards) on the other hand?

Edited by MarqFJA on May 1st 2020 at 2:39:01 PM

My admittedly shoot-from-the-hip guess is not long at all, the question is how close does that not long at all comes to what's depicted. For that, I'd have to do a lot more research. I remember looking up the stages of hypovolemic shock, I'd have to look them up again because I can't remember at what point the heart starts beating faster and at what point it shuts down, and whatever the heart is doing has a lot to do with how fast the blood is lost.

Well, for reference, here is the iconic scene of the very first chestburster. The whole video is just a little over 2 minutes, but the process of the creature's "birth" from the first definitive sign only lasts one minute and a few seconds, starting from 0:40 and ending at 1:48; blood first erupts from 1:30, which logically marks the latest possible moment that the chestburster could've gotten into position to start ramming against the sternum (assuming that it can at least partially fracture it on the first try).

Alien is pretty justified in the context that the ship's doctor is in on it. The Space Truckers aren't the sort of people who would overly concern themselves with medical details either.

Plus, Ash had to overrule Ripley.

... I don't how any of what you said has anything to do with what I'm asking.

Edited by MarqFJA on Apr 7th 2020 at 5:29:22 PM

Preliminary look (not yet done re-reading the webmd page): What hypovolemic shock looks and feels like can vary greatly depending on, among other things, how quickly you lost the blood. So I definitely can't dig up my notes and re-use what I calculated for the vicious vampires in my stories, because they cause way less structural integrity damage than a Chest Burster and thus the vampire victims would lose their blood more slowly than the situation we're discussing.

Another question that belatedly occurred to me to wonder about is which muscles are attached to the sternum (or thereabouts)? Any muscles with tendons in that general vicinity will all be useless with their anchor bones wrecked. Depending on which muscles those are, perhaps it's not that realistic after all for Ellen Ripley in Alien 3 to be able to move her arms, let alone grab her little spawnling for Taking You with Me...

Edited by Miss_Desperado on Apr 7th 2020 at 10:47:15 AM

I always liked it.

And yet utterly irrelevant to the line of discussion.

The pectoralis major muscles are connected to the sternum, and they're rather important for moving the arms, being directly responsible for flexion, extension and rotation of the humerus (the upper arm bone). The pectoralis minor muscles, meanwhile, are attached to the ribs directly, which should make them affected by the sternum's destruction as well, albeit probably not as much given that they'd still retain their "anchors".

Take a good long look at where you're posting. This is the MEDICAL thread, where we discuss "gross" biology in morbid detail, not whatever you just interjected — social commentary?

I wonder how fast shredding the lungs will kill someone? The heart and major blood vessels aren't the only critical organs the Chest Burster is chewing/ripping through. I also have to wonder how someone can scream after their diaphragm is punctured.

Short vid about kidney stones.

Tonsil stone, gall stone, kidney stone...

I don't suppose there's any "stone" in human body that means good thing?

Generally when minerals are being lumped together in your body it's a sign that something has gone wrong.

So...no.

Hey guys, bit of a bunny trail question: Which hurts worse and by how much, getting a boot to the kidney or getting a boot to the man bits?

...Why? Are you planning to do one or the other?

No, I'm writing a scene where somebody wearing boots trips over somebody else.

Edited by Miss_Desperado on Apr 30th 2020 at 8:09:14 AM

I suppose it's unfortunate that nobody seems to have an answer to this question from early April, so here's a different one: What exactly sets apart "biomedicine" and "biomedical science/technology etc." from "medicine" and "medical science/technology/etc."? Aren't all things medicine rooted in biology to begin with?

Given how many people still think homeopathy works, I’d say no.

As for the Alien question, I’m pretty sure they were explicitly going for shock value rather than medical realism. If I recall from interviews, originally they had conceptualized the Xenomorph reproductive cycle killing people and turning their corpses into eggs, but they decided it would be more dramatic for the creature to burst out of a still-living character. A person would most likely expire long before anything could get out of them like that, simply having something that large occupying your upper chest would probably be lethal on its own. I believe it was justified after the fact by saying that the chestburster kept the person alive somehow.

Edited by archonspeaks on May 1st 2020 at 5:27:59 AM