Supplemental oxygen therapy, so that moderate heart and lung damage isn't an inescapable death sentence

[Sheeplets]

In real world settings when patients have trouble breathing, stop breathing, or go into shock and can't get the oxygen that they need they're usually put onto or ventilated from tanks of concentrated oxygen via masks. By giving them air to breathe with more of an oxygen content than what's in room air it helps to make up for that deficit and keep their tissues from starving to death.

Given how heavily Brainmed relies on the blood oxygenation mechanics and how frequently people die from collapsed lungs and heart damage because there's few practical ways to treat the crash besides loading up on chems, janky >40kPA internals tanks, and needle decompressions while you wait for a surgeon (if you even get one). It's always seemed kind of strange that in the future we have blue oxygen juice but also we don't have regular medical oxygen as an option to treat the effects of blood loss and breathing issues. There's got to be a better way for a better way, so here's mine. 

My suggestion is to add a few rolling oxygen stands to the medical bay, similar to IV stands, which operate the exact same way that existing IVs do now - running off of an internals tank instead of a blood bag. You select a flow rate for your oxygen and you drag/drop the stand onto patients from one tile away, sticking the same "line" into them to indicate them being on.

When they're hooked on they passively receive a buff to their oxygenation or breathing (or both?) depending on the set flow rate, as well as the stand providing ventilations for patients who aren't breathing on their own. Lower flow rates use less gas, but give less of an improvement. This'll allow you to treat mild as well as more severe cases and effectively stabilize your patients in the ICU as opposed to them just being shit out of luck because they got organ damage while there wasn't any Peridaxon onboard.

(OR - Alternatively just skip out on all of that and add this as a sleeper function just like dialysis and stomach pumping. It would make for less sprite work with the glaring downside of being unable to monitor or treat other issues while they're inside. But frankly this seems a much easier way to go.)

Patients in the field would get 2463's spin on a bag valve mask with a similar but smaller oxygen tank. Set your flow rate on the portable device, mouth-target on help intent, and you'll deliver a breath of fresh air into their lungs by ventilating them. Think of it as way more efficient rescue breathing with a finite resource. This oxygen "buff" would ideally only last a few (5-6) seconds and then rapidly decay so that this kind of ventilating is an active process, but also doesn't give you carpel tunnel like CPR does now. Stick two of these in the store room and another two in the EMT bay. Here's a video that demonstrates these IRL. They're cool.

TL;DR - Add breathing machines for suffocating people. It should go without saying that this is all is subject to change. Please feel free to suggest better ideas or tweaks, this is just how I picture the concept in my own head.

 

[Carver]

I'm always in support of more medical tools to help those in critical condition, especially with how unforgiving nu-baymed is.

[WickedCybs]

It's a good suggestion. Always thought medical should always have its own oxygen supply easily available for patients

[VisVirific]

I think it'd be very interesting to see it implemented, as then it does provide a better, more consistent alternative that isn't chemist-reliant like Dexalin Plus. Maybe it could be an upgrade-able equipment so that Scientists have something else to do in Medical like they used to visit to upgrade the machines.

[Melariara]

Very good suggestion. Would be great to see in lowpop rounds where theres no/minimal medical but people suffocating.

[Lordnesh]

Another agreement from me. With only four options to heal oxy loss, one of which is usually unavailable (Rezadone), patients with extreme oxygen damage have to be monitored and kept on a steady drip of inaprovaline and dexlin/plus. That's two people forced out of the round for some time. The other option is to give Pneumalin or Dexalin/plus the ability to heal oxy loss at a decent rate like all the other damage healing medicines.

[Lmwevil]

tbh the oxygen outputs with masks built in on the walls should be in every surgical room so I can put them to a high KPA output to keep popped lungs open a bit longer, probably also in triage as well

 

good idea tho!

[Estutes]

When the brain is heavily damaged (or scarered? I am not sure of this one) heart and breathing is heavily reduced or stoped. Something to substitute these until a replacement or a fix can be found would be neat. IRL there are machines that replace lung and heart functions temporarily. This could be useful for a low Human/Tajara/Skrell medical crew where almost none of them are able to do CPR (diona, IPC, borgs, vaurca). The most useful way of putting something like this would be like an independent machine in storage room ready to be deployed either for stabilisation purposes or surgery. More could be built if requested. When you have a very weak patient you need a minimum of 2/3 crew assisting the patient. Either 1 of them doing surgery, other controling medicines and other doing CPR and monitoring vitals or bringing resources to save the patient. This would be fine for a IRL hospital or for very very ill patients with Major Systemic Organ Failure which then they do require even more crew. But any critically ill patient where their vitals need to be maintaned constantly but there is no automatic machine to do those repetitive tasks until a solution can be found. This allocates so much crew in a patient that could otherwise be saved in an advanced clinical setting like NSS Aurora medbay.

I get that the first part of the stabilisation procedure may involve more crew but after the first attention is given (hooking machines, putting the medicines etc), this should be enough for a smaller crew to help the patient.

I would also add more IVs in the storage room as recent medical changes require sometimes more than a single reagent to be used on a single patient.

Funny while writing about this, I realized... Human on human ventilations doing CPR is easy, but on a Tajara or Skrell? How do mouths interact there lol? 

[SgtSammac]

Yes please. Could potentially make it an Atmos thing too if someone wanted to touch the code. >.> 

Like have a can of pure oxygen in the cryo maint room, and from that have pipes through medical to like output valves on the wall that you can click-drag a patient wearing a mask too. ? 

And then for medics/mobility a “medical oxygen” bottle the size of the emergency ones that can just be shoved in suit slot, add a mask and go-go-go (would need coding to negate the CPR clear mouth requirement.