Polite Dissent

18 Responses to “ Picture Quiz: New X-Men ”

1. Mike
   January 4th, 2008 at 12:20 am
   

   Not sure… But it seems strange to me that there’s a two tubes running to his nose.

2. Slarti
   January 4th, 2008 at 12:37 am
   

   Actually, I suspect that it’s more particularly that he’s got the excessive combo of intubation and a nasal cannula.

3. Jonathan Hohensee
   January 4th, 2008 at 1:32 am
   

   A nose tube and a breathing tube?

4. Cheryl
   January 4th, 2008 at 2:50 am
   

   nasal cannula and he’s intubated?

5. Carl
   January 4th, 2008 at 6:48 am
   

   This isn’t what Scott meant, but if his brain function is “off the map” can he really be comatose?

6. David Oakes
   January 4th, 2008 at 9:48 am
   

   That’s not a nasal cannula, that’s a Shi’ar head restraint!

   (Cannulas have two tubes, but don’t they usually go around the head and meet up, so as not to restrict movement/get tangled up?)

7. Keith
   January 4th, 2008 at 10:10 am
   

   Well, for one thing, his neck is 14 inches long. Did he get stretched, somehow?

8. Matt
   January 4th, 2008 at 11:45 am
   

   Well since everybody caught the two breathing things already, I’m gonna point out that his left eye is significantly higher on his head than his right.

9. mike.
   January 4th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
   

   I’m with Carl. Doesn’t “coma” mean no brain function? But that would be contradiction, not redundancy. Hmmm.

10. jonessoda
    January 4th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
    

    At first I thought it was kinda strange that he had two big fat tubes running to his ET tube.

    Then I noticed he had a nasal cannula.

    With an endotracheal tube.

    So yeah. That.

    I don’t really have experience with ET tubes, so is it normal to have those two big tubes?

11. Loren
    January 4th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
    

    I know it’s a standard mistake in these scenes, but what’s holding the cannula in his nose?

12. Laura
    January 5th, 2008 at 3:31 am
    

    There’s no redundancy. He’s got an ET tube, coupled with a high-tech nasal mucus drain. On either side of the bed (not seen) are buckets filling with snot. It’s a medical wonder, I tell you. I’m going to have to get that set up for my next bout with hayfever so I can sleep through the night so soundly that it appears that I’m in a coma, even though my brain is whirring away at higher level activities. The self-intubation will be a bear, but a small price to pay for actually getting some sleep.

    Other things confuse me. He is in uniform; did someone lose all the scissors or is there a new approach that recommends that coma patients be left in tight fitting garments? Doesn’t that make placement of the urinary catheter tricky? And how do they know anything about his brain, or his heart for that matter, what with there not being any probes? I’m not a medical professional, but I’ve sort of come to expect some actual, you know, monitoring of neurological cases. There must be a logical answer to these questions, but my thinking cap blew up after I figured out about the nasal drainage device.

13. Bad
    January 5th, 2008 at 8:23 am
    

    Coma doesn’t mean no brain function: like many neurological disorders it’s one of those medical definitions that is based more on the patient’s overt and external responses rather than any specific pathology we can identify in the brain. Coma is most simply defined as when the patient is unconscious and cannot be woken up: so unconscious that they will not respond to pain or light or show conscious responses. The closest thing to being able to measure someone’s brain activity and declare “coma” is the lack of sleep/wake cycles. But we still can’t really look into someone’s brain and say “look, this structure is damaged, that means coma” or even “look, he has the specific brain wave patterns of the classic coma.” In fact, there isn’t any one single condition as “coma”: there are all sorts of scales and progression trajectories for comas based on changes in behavior over time.

    Saying that someone’s “brain function” is “off the map” is probably pretty much technobabble. It’s not clear at all what that really means.

14. Bad
    January 5th, 2008 at 8:26 am
    

    I bet I know what the point of having tubes in his noses even though he’s intubated is for though!

    You see, with his brain function being “off the map,” he’s sure to have psychic nosebleeds. Those tubes will suck away the blood so that it doesn’t drip down into his esophagus or past the sides of the intubation tube into his lungs.

15. Sean
    January 7th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
    

    needs more respirators

16. suedenim
    January 9th, 2008 at 8:57 am
    

    Perhaps a more minor point, but Aren’t the nose tubes themselves drawn oddly? They do split before going to each nostril, but the implication here is that each nostril gets its own separate oxygen tank or something, one on each side of the bed….

17. B.J. Smith
    January 10th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
    

    The nasal cannula and the ventilator tubing is the redundancy. Oxygen is already being taken to his lung and ventilated through the endotrachel tube and ventilator…the nasal cannula is completely pointless.

18. Bad
    January 10th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
    

    I think we all missed another rather important point: what patient in a critical condition that doesn’t seem to have any voluntary movement would be kept in a skin tight leather/rubber/whatevertheheckitis X-Man uniform? Has Forge never heard of bed sores? Did someone even bother to take off his pants so that he could have a bedpan or does he wake up from his coma every so often to take a bathroom break?

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