Thursday, August 12, 2004
Choose Life
Despite what Mark Renton says, I strongly urge you to choose life instead of heroin. I have been visiting with a patient who chose heroin and have seen the misery he has wreaked on his body. In hospital speak, he has a fasciotomy secondary to compartment syndrome on his volar and dorsal upper left extremity. Now what that means to folks in the real world is his left arm is messed up good. After collapsing from a heroin overdose, this person fell to the floor pinning his arm underneath him between his body and a baseball bat lying on the floor. Staying in that position for fifteen plus hours caused what is known as Compartment Syndrome (scroll down to the bottom for a picture): pressure changes in his arm aided by the drug and enhanced by the odd and prolonged position caused his skin to split on both the top and bottom of his arm. The split swelled as the hours passed, exposing muscle, tendon, and bone, and now remains a gaping open wound which cannot be surgically closed. This wound needs to be cleaned daily of its necrotic (dead) tissues, which is accomplished through the application of tweezers. A more severe pain I have never seen anyone in. A more gruesome wound I have never seen. All of this is highly avoidable if you recognize fact from fiction and choose life rather than heroin.
-R
-R
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