I Raised My First Vessel
I had to go in to work today. I didn't mind, though. One of the things we had to do was dress and casket one body. That went fairly smoothly. The other thing to be done was an embalming. We had a case come in either late last night or early this morning. As soon as we got the one body in the casket and ready for visitation we started on the embalming. We raised the femoral artery and began injecting fluid, but as soon as we tried to initiate drainage we ran into problems. My bosses like to use what is called a "heart tap" for drainage.
There are two ways to drain blood from the body while embalming. The most common is to raise the artery for injecting fluids, and the accompanying vein for draining. The vein is opened up, a drain tube
(about a foot long) is inserted and as the formaldehyde is injected, the pressure forces blood out the opening in the vein. The less common method is the heart tap. This is where the trocar (about 2 to 3 feet long)
is inserted directly into the heart and all of the blood drainage exits via that route. The drawback to this method is if it is done incorrectly, you usually have to raise multiple vessels and inject at several points on the body. This is what happened this morning. Either we missed the heart, or there was so much clotting we could not get good drainage.
So we raised six vessels (right and left carotid arteries, right and left brachial arteries, and right and left femoral arteries) and embalmed the body with multiple injections. I was charged with raising the left femoral, which I did easily, I'm relieved to say. I made the incision, probed around with my instruments, located the vein, and since the femoral artery usually lies lateral to the femoral vein, I started looking next to the vein, and in no time at all had found the artery, raised it, cleaned it, and opened it up and inserted the cannula.
For more photos regarding undertaking, check out this site:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/underbunny/sets/3722/ or follow the link at the top of my links list.
There are two ways to drain blood from the body while embalming. The most common is to raise the artery for injecting fluids, and the accompanying vein for draining. The vein is opened up, a drain tube
(about a foot long) is inserted and as the formaldehyde is injected, the pressure forces blood out the opening in the vein. The less common method is the heart tap. This is where the trocar (about 2 to 3 feet long)
is inserted directly into the heart and all of the blood drainage exits via that route. The drawback to this method is if it is done incorrectly, you usually have to raise multiple vessels and inject at several points on the body. This is what happened this morning. Either we missed the heart, or there was so much clotting we could not get good drainage.
So we raised six vessels (right and left carotid arteries, right and left brachial arteries, and right and left femoral arteries) and embalmed the body with multiple injections. I was charged with raising the left femoral, which I did easily, I'm relieved to say. I made the incision, probed around with my instruments, located the vein, and since the femoral artery usually lies lateral to the femoral vein, I started looking next to the vein, and in no time at all had found the artery, raised it, cleaned it, and opened it up and inserted the cannula.
For more photos regarding undertaking, check out this site:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/underbunny/sets/3722/ or follow the link at the top of my links list.
posted by Granimore | 11:32 AM
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