Indexing Title: DCHUA’s Medical Anecdotal Report [07-05] 

MAR Title: Gadget Gremlins 

Date of Medical Observation: August 2005

Narration: 

A seventy-year-old stroke patient has been bedridden for almost a decade.  Frequent bed-tuning schedules would demand 2-3 work shifts.  I partook in the work until I started using an alternating inflatable mattress to prevent bedsores.  It is such a useful device that one wonders why it was not introduced in medical school, and could not be found in either medical supply stores or in hospital ICUs where these are much needed. 

Then there is the patient lifter, a mechanical lever or hydraulic device that enables transferring of a patient from bed to chair and vice versa by a smaller caregiver.  Being left on the wheelchair one afternoon, the patient fell face forward, breaking his neck.  Would it have been better if we had left him bedridden all those eight years? 

A month later, the same patient, now with artificial pathways for both food and air intake was re-hospitalized for pneumonia.  On his 2^nd hospital day, I dismissed beginning bedsores as due to the absence of the inflatable mattress during his first day at the emergency room.  I had faith that the anti-bedsore mattress would relieve these, as it had for all those years before.  It was with the progression of the eight simultaneous bedsores on the 4^th hospital day that I noticed the air exchange hose of the mattress to be kinked under the bed. 

Insights: (Discovery, Stimulus, Reinforcements) (Physical, Psychosocial, Ethical)

Taking care of a severely debilitated patient is most taxing.  It is a blessing that human ingenuity and technology have provided us with a variety of helpful devices in every task. 

References mention that meticulous nursing care outweighs the use of the mattress.  I believed that human error over such a long time greatly outweighed the efficiency of a machine.  It was my folly to dismiss written precautions, trusting my decade of faultless experience with the device. 

Blind trust in technology however leads to disasters, from singular morbidities to nuclear meltdowns.  Vigilance is warranted even and especially when unthinking machinery are involved.  They are double-edged swords.