No, if a patient is declared brain dead, there is usually no sedation given. It shouldn’t be necessary, as the neurons responsible for sensing pain aren’t alive and processing signals, and extra medication like sedation comes with the risk of hemodynamic instability, which is already kind of a headache in brain dead patients as the brain is no longer meditating that (extremely oversimplified). Yes, sedation can be measured (sorta) with a BIS probe, a spectral imaging probe on the forehead that acts like an EEG with fewer probes, but it’s not very useful in brain death as it’s ultimately looking at blood flow, and in brain death, we don’t expect to see blood flow to the brain.

All of this, of course, assumes that he was declared brain dead, which is a very specific legal term with very specific parameters that vary slightly state by state, which seems unlikely in this situation. He may have been deemed to have a severe neurologic injury with an unlikely prognosis of meaningful recovery, and thus be a planned DCD (declared cardiac death) donation, meaning placed on a minimally assistive ventilatory support and allowed to die once his respiratory drive was so low he died of hypoxic respiratory failure. But the article is long on anecdotes and short on the technical terms physicians would use, so it’s hard to say.

Same! New long for me in I can’t remember how long.

Day 4, might be the longest this year for me. IWNDWYT

7k for a noncontrast CT scan is absurd. As is the $700 CMP. And then charging around $1900 for nurses to hang IV fluids and two medications when the ER visit itself is only billed at $1700? Bonkers.

When I look up surgical code payback numbers, my 1-2 hour surgeries rarely top $3k. So this hospital is really reaching with some of its numbers.

Why were the cops even there?

As a surgeon, I have a lot of questions. But I have trouble accepting a personal injury attorney’s statement at face value when they stand to benefit from a judgement or settlement, too.

That seems like a really easy mistake to not make. Like, has North Korea ever been to the Olympics?

Well, one did. There were videos and everything of her death.

Huh, and here I was thinking you didn’t have to test Fallout games to release them.

“I only killed that one girl, not my accomplice”??

I mean, the whole turning point of the story was the death on the boat. But I guess that was cool?

I wish I could set aside a week to write down all Donald Trump says in court.

… wait no I don’t.

I can go lower.

For college football fans, Shutdown Fullcast, the only college football podcast. They occasionally accidentally talk about football.