  Mystery
This week: Medical mysteries Edited by: Arakun the Twisted Raccoon  
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Quote for the week: "I didn't invent forensic science and medicine. I was just one of the first people to recognize how interesting it is."
~Patricia Cornwall |
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Medical and forensic information are often important parts of mystery stories. In some stories, a victim has been injured and taken to the hospital. The investigators may need to obtain information about the nature of the injuries in order to investigate the crime. In medical thrillers, such as those written by Robin Cook and Patricia Cornwall, medical or forensic puzzles are central to the story.
Medical scenarios in stories, movies and TV shows are often highly inaccurate and unrealistic. Even though most readers might not have enough medical or scientific background to know whether the medical scenarios in your stories are accurate, it is still important to be as realistic as possible. If a reader knows things would not happen that way in real life, it will pull them out of the story.
Here is one example from a TV show I saw several years ago. Can you spot the errors?
A villain tried to kill a character who survived the attack and was taken to a hospital where she was placed in the intensive care unit. The villain decided to sneak in to the hospital and finish the job. He dressed in medical scrubs, walked in to the hospital, and into her room, unnoticed by anyone. The unconscious patient lay on the bed, with a nasal cannula oxygen tube in her nose. The villain turned on the television to cover any noise and made a big show of cutting the tube. The patient immediately began choking and gasping for air, and the villain sneaked out of the room, once again unnoticed. The nurses, who hadn't noticed the man sneaking into the ICU, suddenly realized that the TV was on in an unconscious patient's room, and rushed down the hall to find the patient in cardiac arrest.
-Okay, first of all, an intensive care unit usually doesn't look like the rest of a hospital. Instead of long corridors with individual rooms, an ICU is often just one large open area with the nurses' station in the center. If the rooms do have individual walls, they are often made of clear plexiglass, with curtains that can be drawn around the patient's bed for privacy. It would be quite difficult for anyone to sneak in and fiddle around with the equipment in a patient's room without being noticed by staff.
-Each patient in a modern ICU is usually hooked up to a telemetry monitor, which reports heart rate and other vital signs to a screen at the nurses' station. Any significant change in heart rate, breathing, or other vital signs would cause an alarm to go off. Larger ICUs often have a telemetry technician whose job involves watching the monitor screens and noting even minor changes. The staff would have noticed something was wrong long before the attacker left the room.
-A patient who is receiving oxygen through a nasal cannula (nasal prong) usually is getting a relatively low level of oxygen, and probably wouldn't immediately go into distress if it was removed. Many patients might not even notice it was gone. A ventilator patient would be likely go into this type of distress if the ventilator was suddenly removed, but when it is disconnected or even turned off, it emits loud annoying alarms that would be heard by anyone in the immediate area.
-I'm sure cutting the oxygen tube was done because it was dramatic, but all he would have had to do was turn off the oxygen!
Here are a few other cringeworthy items I have noticed in books and movies:
-Defibrillating a patient through his shirt
-Members of the general public wandering into all areas of a hospital or mental health facility without being noticed or challenged.
-Lab results that usually take days coming back in ten minutes.
Something to try: Write a mystery story set in a hospital.
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Mystery: November 22, 2017 Issue [#8611]
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