Two pictures KK drew today. She wanted Brother D and Ms. Bren to see them.

Elder sign

Medical Review: Dead Snow

Dead Snow, the Norwegian zom-com from 2009 caught my eye this weekend so I popped it in for a watch last night. This was a fun Sam Rami influenced tale of a group of medical students trapped in a mountain cabin with zombies.

First off, Medical students? Yes. Medical students hanging out together on vacation. This I identify with because I still get together with my old med-school buddies every fall to go camping. This is how med-students spend their free time. We don't play games plotting perfect murders or shoot each other up with drugs to try and achieve near death experiences or hang out in the morgue experimenting on dead bodies. After all, If we hung out in the morgue the door might shut and we'd all suffocate...

There must be something about European socialized medicine that attracts a different caliber of student than I am used to, however. I mean, these kids are DUMB. Watching them hang out in the first act of the movie left me eager for the zombies to show up and take them out. Luckily the wait isn't very long.

Now, this film has some good zombie medical tips on display. For example, One character field- dresses a nasty neck wound. Now, first off, he should have irrigated this wound before closing it. Bite wounds harbor some serious bacteria, especially human bite wounds. I shudder to imagine what must be in a zombie's mouth. You don't want to seal those bacteria inside a closed wound. Still, I applaud his choice of fishing line for suture. The fish hook as needle is OK, but I suspect he had great difficulty passing the eye of the needle as he threw his stitches. Neck skin is tough. Also that sucker must have been pretty slippery with all that blood. He's have been better off using something to hold it as a needle driver. He does finish up with a nice duct tape pressure bandage in the end. As a wise man once said, "If you can't fix it, Duck it."

Now his fellow student, however must have been much lower in the class rankings. He displayed surgical skills in his self amputation that proved he'd be much better off in a specialty like Psychiatry where he was never allowed near a scalpel. A chainsaw is the proper tool for lopping tree limbs, not human limbs. The wound was left like hamburger. He did not leave tapered muscle flaps to close over the stump. Worse, he cut the arm off above the elbow. Later when fit with a prosthesis I'm sure he would regret no longer having a working elbow because he got carried away and cut too high. And a brief cautery in a gasoline fire is not going to provide adequate hemostasis.

If I learned one thing from this movie, however, it is the incredible tensile strength of the human intestine. Who would have thought that even when dead and rotting in a zombie corpse, intestines are as strong as nylon rope. There might be a good "green" industry here to exploit. Outdoors men tend to be eco friendly. What could be more environmentally conscious than replacing mountaineers synthetic ropes with human guts? They'd keep your tent up in a strong wind as well.

Overall I had a lot of fun with this movie. My rating for MOZ would be four head shots. But maybe Brother D doesn't want me to use head shots for my medical reviews. I'll have to get with him on that. I could use something like four lethal injections I guess. I'll have to think on it.

Giving bad news is sometimes the hardest part of medicine.

H1N1 Vaccine

The CDC has directed all patients who want to avoid the H1N1 flu to get the vaccine. They have declared it perfectly safe and have reported no adverse events. They specifically have denied GBS or ascending paralysis with this vaccine. I have believed everything I have been told. I have promoted the vaccine to all my patients. I have given hundreds of doses. I have taken it myself and given it to my children.

This week however, I have hears from 3 patients who claim to know someone who knows someone who got GBS from the vaccine. This is a disorder where your muscles start being paralyzed from the feet moving up the body. It can paralyze your respiratory muscles preventing you from breathing without mechanical ventilators until the disease runs its course.

I can find no official info on this reaction anywhere in the news or from the CDC. I do not know if this is just urban legend or if this is the start of something real. I am bothered enough by this though to recommend that the MOZ family delay getting the H1N1 vaccine until more is known. If you've already had it like me, you're fine. this is not a delayed reaction type event. It happens very quickly after being vaccinated. However, I would not put anyone else at risk at this time. The H1N1 or "hiney" flu as I like to call it has died down. It was not that significant in it's severity when it was prevalent, only highly contagious. So the risk from the disease to family members is very low at this time.

I do not like being an alarmist. But I will let you know when something concerns me. I will post more information and opinions as I find out more.

Your Faithful Family Doctor.

Wow!!!!

I can't believe this site is all mine to play with. Thanks Brother D and Ms. Bren and all the guys who built this site. I am honored by the place.

As my official MOZ blog I intend to use it to honor the podcast with zombie related posts from my medical perspective. I'll give you medical news when it is relevant, movie reviews when I see something interesting and in general just spread my thoughts here.

I also will use this as a site for more serious medical alerts when issues come up. As swine flu news was just breaking last year I tried to keep my analysis on the web for those who wanted my opinion to see. In the future when such events occur, I will use this site to keep the MOZ family informed.

What I will not do is type correctly, spell correctly, or use proper punctuation. I suck at those skills.

So anyone and everyone who is so inclined in the MOZ family, welcome to the Med of the Dead blog. And thank you for this great honor.