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ms-demeanor · 7 months

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IDK that I've ever put it in one post before, but here's the transplant speedrun.

1 - Valentines day 2021, he's admitted to the hospital. We take a pre-hospital selfie then I shave his head and he shaves his beard because he doesn't want to deal with hair at the hospital. Me and his mom drop him off; at that point you can only visit someone as they are actually dying and we're told that he's going to stay in the hospital until he gets a transplant or he dies, and if he's rejected as a transplant recipient he'll receive palliative care in this hospital.

2 - First week of March, they allow patients to have one screened visitor; this is our first visit - I take photos in the hospital to show his mom because at this point he has a pump in his shoulder and it is difficult for him to move his arms to use his phone. He has also been confined to a bed since the week he arrived because he's on the ECMO machine, so he can't walk or move around, though they stand him up every once in a while. At one point one of the ecmo tubes pulls out of his femoral artery, which is Not! Great! He also needed a blood transfusion about every two days at that point, which worried the doctors because it increased his likelihood of rejecting. But he had been approved for transplant at that point!

The first thing he said to me on this visit was "look, I have abs" and then he showed me his abs because it turns out when you're really really dying of heart failure your body begins to eat itself.

3 - Now That's What I Call Jaundice (cardiac cirrhosis is liver failure as a result of heart failure and it's pretty much the big giant neon flashing sign of heart failure that says "hey you're fucking dying" so if you've got heart failure and your bilirubin number is off or the whites of your eyes are yellow please kick up a gigantic stink until they check your liver; large bastard's GP, who is my doctor, who I hate, saw his bloodwork with a very high bilirubin number a month before he was diagnosed with cardiac cirrhosis and wrote it off as a testing fluke fuck that guy)

4 - Don't let the sad face fool you, he's acting pathetic so that his mom will stop yelling about the fact that I'm bringing him cookies. He's allowed to have cookies. At that point he weighed 98kg and was outsourcing his heartbeat, he was allowed to eat whatever he wanted. (have i mentioned that I was moving us from Vegas to LA at this time? I was bringing him cookies because I'd baked hundreds of peanut butter cookies and other cookies to use up the flour, sugar, and peanut butter in the vegas house)

5 - Mid-march, he's got a match! He called me when I was in Vegas filling up the truck with another load and I drove right back and to the hospital. Once he went in for surgery I drove to his mom's house and crashed, then woke up and drove to our storage unit and unpacked the truck while I waited to hear from the doctors. I was unloading a bookcase when I got the call. (There wasn't any point in waiting alone in the hospital for sixteen hours; either he was going to make it or he wasn't and someone was going to have to unload the truck at some point. People have been weird about this, like I should have been sitting at his side all the time, but there was a two-hour daily limit for most visits and look i have sat in a waiting room while this dude had a thirteen hour surgery i do not need a repeat of that experience without the soothing balm of nicotine getting me through it; so unloading a truck it was)

6 - Two days after surgery and kind of mad about it. His chest hurt a lot (obviously) but, like, a lot a lot because they'd had to open him up for the bypass just two years earlier.

7 - First walk outside of his room after transplant in early April; he needed a LOT of PT because of how much muscle he'd lost. He lost sixty pounds in the hospital before the surgery, and only gained back about twenty while he was in there.

8 - A visit from the tiny doggo

9 - I come to visit and I've got a new phone with a portrait mode so he steals it and takes stupid pictures for a few minutes. Dude is bored and restless; this is in late april and he's feeling well enough to be moody. ETA: There is a jar of pickles in front of him because he'd been fluid limited for a long time and his salt levels were off and when he got to the hospital they were like "you need electrolytes and a lot of salt" and he was like "sweetheart can you please please please bring me delicious salty things" so I was bringing him jars of pickled mushrooms and garlic stuffed olives and just a huge number of pickles that he kept trying to share with the nurses. "Alli brought the mushrooms again; would you like a pickled mushroom? I have fancy toothpicks to share them with!"

10 - He comes home for the first time in early May; he ends up getting readmitted two more times because of complications before finally being released in early July. ETA: The second time he got readmitted it was for something that he wasn't at all worried about but that they needed to monitor for a couple weeks so he was *SO BORED* and actually feeling pretty okay; so at one point when I was leaving the parking garage at 8pm my car wouldn't start, I did some troubleshooting with the manual and the internet and didn't figure it out, so I called him and he tried to troubleshoot over the phone and got frustrated and was begging his nurses to let him come out to the parking structure to work on my car (they refused) - I ended up getting a tow and fixing it when I replaced the battery terminals.

Photos are all posted with his permission.

Also I dyed my hair purple between photos one and two because it's his favorite color. I also bought a blue dress, red tights, and yellow shoes to wear to visit him because he always teases me for wearing so much black.

I just love him a lot. It was a hard couple years there, but things are getting better.

#tw medical

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love-and-deepspace-wiki · 4 days

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Akso Hospital

Location: Downtown Linkon City

Clinic Number: 2122637824

"Linkon's municipal hospital, located downtown. A facility focused on medicine, research, and education. Its divisions, such as the Division of Cardiac Surgery and Division of General Surgery, are widely respected. At the forefront of healthcare, it is a world-renowned medical institute."

- Linkonopedia Entry

Details:

Okay, this is going to be a long one. Rather than try to cram everything into one huge post, I'll be splitting it up into a series of posts to sufficiently cover everything. I'll list the link menu at the bottom of this main post. But first, let's go over the general details of Akso Hospital!

Mottos:

"Akso Hospital, for a brighter future"

"For A Better Future of Life"

"Akso Hospital Cares"

Features & Facts:

It has its own Flux Stabilizer

The Akso Remote Monitor is a hospital took used for monitoring the health status of remote patients

It has a rooftop helipad with at least two rescue helicopters

Akso Hospital has at least 11 confirmed floors

The protaganist mentions a waiting area with a TV that plays movies. According to Zayne, there's also popcorn in a vending machine next to the nurse's station.

Events:

Hospital Staff's Lottery: This year, the grand prize was a hot springs trip for two. Zayne won.

Patient's Favorite Doctor: An annual public poll the hospital releases. The protaganist says the votes showed Zayne was very popular this year. The winner will be forced to appear in the hospital's promotional videos (a detail Zayne is not excited about lol)

Health Initiatives:

Zayne says the hospital has many health initiatives. But these are the ones specifically mentioned by name:

The Mindfulness Chamber: a mindfulness initiative

Get Out of Bed: an encouragement initiative

Floorplan:

At Akso Hospital, floors are denoted with a letter (possibly indicating the specific building or wing?) followed by the floor number. Rooms, offices, or defined areas on that floor are two-digit numbers. (For example, Room 2 on the fifth floor of building B would likely be written as "B6/B06, Room B02".)

Here are some Akso Hospital room locations I was able to confirm throughout the game:

Floor A8/A08:

00-03: Diagnosis Rooms

02: Division of Cardiac Surgery

04-06: Doctor's Offices

Floor A4/A04:

Reception where Yvonne works

Zayne's check up room is on floor A4

017: Radiotherapy

Link Menu:

Cafeteria

Division of General Surgery

Division of Cardiac Surgery

Division of Evol and Protocore Medical Technology

Emergency Room

Evol-Cardiac Medical Research Lab

Garden

Neurology and Sleep Center

Pediatrics & Pediatric Ward

Public Relations Division

Radiology

Radiotherapy

Surgery Center

(In-Game Medical Glossary)

#love and deepspace #linkon city #akso hospital #zayne #dr zayne #lads #lads zayne

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tricky-pockets · 1 month

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so, about the people who think that Laziness Is The Worst Sin. you know. those who imagine themselves to be Righteous Bootstrap Pullers.

statistically, a fair number of them will need heart surgery at some point in their lives. do you know how long a human can maintain accuracy at monotonous repetition of a 30-second-long task without a break? neither do I, but it's gotta less than 4 hours.

anyway, they'll need heart surgery. and sometimes it's close to the end of a shift and my brain is mush and I want to cry and I still pull every fiber of will together to keep checking the cardiac cannulae for flaws before I seal them into their pouches.

[correct cuff placement not obscuring airflow. no wrinkles no tears no bubbles no pinholes. sufficient airflow. double check airflow. no leakage from lumen line. printed depth marks and product code legible correct complete aligned. tip formed correctly no sharp edges from bad plastic molding old tipping machine, check with sensitive fingertips; rough edges can perforate. no voids in glue joints no excess glue to chip off and land in a blood vessel. no particulate matter, especially that weird orange stuff that's in the luer caps sometimes.]

people who disdain labor rights will need heart surgery and I will do everything in my power to not let them die on the table. and so I think maybe I should get a couple 15-minute breaks and perhaps the option to wear headphones. so I'm not fatigued. while I'm checking the cannula for your fucking heart surgery.

#sam tag 🌌#the horrors

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whumpy-daydreams · 9 months

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Cardiac Surgery

masterlist

Decided to make a whole post about cardiac surgery because goddammit I spent two months in that department and it changed my psychology.

Open heart surgery is the most insane thing I've ever seen (and that's saying something)

First there's the monitoring:

five lead ecg

arterial blood pressure monitoring

two core body temperature probes (one down the throat, the other in the urethra)

central venous blood pressure monitoring

BIS monitor (measures brain activity)

AND THEN

defibrillator pads connected before surgery begins

catheter

central line (basically a cannula that goes in a BIG vein right to your heart)

multiple other cannulas

ALSO BYPASS! Putting people on bypass is insane and I still can't get my head around it.

The surgeon connects all the blood vessels that go into the heart to big plastic tubes which go to a bypass machine, which then pumps blood around the patient's body!

The weirdest thing about it is the heart rate goes to zero and the blood pressure is also non-existent. It can also cool down or heat up the blood which is important for:

AORTA surgery! The aorta is the super super big artery that delivers oxygenated blood from the heart to the rest of the body. However, if you need to disconnect the aorta, you're also taking blood away from the rest of the body.

This isn't a problem for most of the body, which can survive for an hour or two - but brain damage can start after only a couple of minutes. So to prevent this, we cool the patient down.

And by cool the patient down I mean temporarily kill the patient. Core body temperature is dropped to 20 degrees celsius (68 fahrenheit) to stop all brain function, and the heart is also stopped. This way the aorta can be operated on for up to 40 minutes.

In fact, in most open heart surgery you have to stop the heart, even if you don't also stop brain function. But that leaves the question - how do you start the heart again?

In any other situation this would be called a cardiac arrest and treated immediately with CPR and a defibrillator. But not in cardiac surgery! No. In cardiac surgery they don't use your typical defibrillator - they use metal paddles directly on the heart to get it going. No CPR for cardiac surgeons, only high voltage electricity.

(i really want to put a picture in but they're all really graphic. If you're up to seeing open heart surgery search for 'open chest defibrillation')

After surgery the patient isn't woken up immediately. They go to the ICU and stay anaesthetised for a few more hours to allow the heart to recover.

#heart surgery #tw medical #tw surgery #i love cardiac surgery but most of it is boring because it takes so long #youre just sat around for 8 hours because you cant see anything #its still really cool though #fucked up my perception of normal vital signs #brief guide to surgery #medical whump

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kk095 · 2 years

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Morning Rush Hour

*here's a quick story I came up with. Hope you guys enjoy!*

A slow weekday morning turned busy seemingly out of nowhere when 2 patients were brought into the emergency department after being involved in a high speed car accident with each other. The trauma team split up- Dr Lindsay, nurse Nancy and nurse Heather would take one patient, while Dr Jose, nurse Ashley, and nurse Cara would take the other. The two teams donned their yellow trauma gowns, put on fresh gloves, and waited patiently for the ambulances to arrive.

Sure enough in the coming minutes, the first of the two patients arrived and we’re brought to the first trauma room where Dr Lindsay waited. Her patient would be Jen- a cute, petite, 33 year old Asian woman with shoulder length dark hair who worked as an assistant manager at a local bank. Jen arrived at the ER in full cardiac arrest. She laid on a backboard intubated, wearing a c-collar, her eyes half open with a dull, expressionless gaze. IV lines were sticking out of both arms, EKG electrodes were all over her chest, and her nude body was littered with cuts, bruises, and abrasions. From what the medics gathered, Jen had sustained major blunt trauma to the chest and abdomen from the deceleration force of the accident. The medics mentioned Jen had been down for 8 minutes, was defibrillated 3 times, and given 2 doses of epinephrine and atropine intravenously. With the medic’s quick rundown to the ER team, it was now up to Lindsay, Heather, and Nancy to resuscitate the cute, 33 year old bank manager. “alright, let’s transfer her on my count. One… two… THREE!” Dr Lindsay ordered. The monitors beeped loudly and frequently during the transfer since CPR was temporarily stopped. Nurse Heather resumed CPR, delivering deep, violent chest compressions on the petite woman.

While Dr Lindsay’s half of the trauma team began working passionately to save Jen, the second patient arrived. Patient #2 was Carly- a 21 year old community college student who stood at 5’9 with a tall, skinny build, had blue eyes and fair skin, electric blue hair with bangs, and had numerous tattoos and piercings. Carly laid on a backboard wearing a c-collar as well. She was awake, alert, and in tremendous pain. Carly had sustained an open femur fracture on her left leg, which was reduced and stabilized by the medics, while also having some bruising and swelling on her abdomen. Carly’s blood pressure was low and her heart rate was high, which was a clear indication of shock. She was transferred onto the trauma room table underneath the large overhead light, and Dr Jose began his initial examination of her. Since her vital signs showed evidence of shock, Dr Jose decided to hang 2 units of o-neg, 1 unit of platelets, and 1 unit of plasma. While palpating the bruised area of Carly’s abdomen, she winced in pain as the doctor felt that area. “abdomen is tender and rigid. Let’s get an ultrasound.” The doctor ordered. Nurse Ashley set up the ultrasound machine and squirted the gel onto Carly’s abdomen. Dr Jose grabbed the ultrasound wand and spread the gel around, taking a look at the monitor. “bleeding in the upper left quadrant. Probably a splenic lac. Let’s get her over to radiology for a CT scan of her abdomen and leg, then page surgery and Ortho, let’s keep them in the loop.” Dr Jose ordered. With that said, Carly was taken out of the ER and wheeled over to radiology by that half of the trauma team.

Meanwhile, Jen was still being coded violently in the neighboring trauma room. Lindsay discovered and left sided tension pneumothorax, so a chest tube was placed while Carly was being examined, but Jen still remained in full cardiac arrest. An echocardiogram showed cardiac tamponade, so Dr Lindsay decided to perform a pericardiocentesis. Dr Lindsay inserted an 18 gauge needle into the 6th intercostal space, and into the apex of Jen’s heart. Lindsay was met with intermittent aspiration of partially coagulated blood. She positioned the needle at a slightly different angle and carefully moved it a few millimeters further into the patient’s chest, finally obtaining more steady drainage from the site. Lindsay pulled back on the plunger of the needle, filling the body of the needle up with a rather large amount of blood quickly. Lindsay removed the needle and did an echocardiogram, which showed that blood was almost instantly re-entering the pericardium once again. “crap. Get me a thoracotomy tray, I need to open her up.” Dr Lindsay said, shaking her head. Jen’s chest was splashed with betadine and Dr Lindsay picked up a scalpel in anticipation of the first cut.

Over in radiology, Carly was receiving a CT scan. The leg portion of the CT scan showed that the femur only had one, albeit, large break, and didn’t have any impact on any surrounding structures such as nerves or blood vessels. The abdominal portion of the CT scan was performed with contrast to see if the source of Carly’s internal bleeding could be traced to a vessel, or if it was an injury to the spleen alone. The CT scan with contrast confirmed the spleen injury, but it also showed that the splenic artery was partially detached from the abdominal aorta. “page surgery, she needs to go up there asap.” Dr Jose says, looking at the scan. Once again, Carly was taken out of radiology and rushed over to a nearby elevator. Jose breaks the news to Carly about needing surgery. “surgery? What’s going on?! Am I gonna be ok?!” she asks nervously in response. “we need to get you up to surgery to fix your leg and the bleeding inside your belly. You’re gonna be in great hands- I promise!” Dr Jose tells Carly. The girl still seemed nervous, but she knew she didn’t have much of an option. She was shocked this was how her morning turned out anyway. She almost wished she was sitting in her boring algebra class instead of on a gurney in a hospital. “It’s gonna be ok. I’ll be ok. They know what they’re doing.” Carly thought to herself, attempting to calm her nerves. The elevator dinged and the door opened, and she was wheeled out. In a matter of what felt like a few seconds, she was in an operating room, being prepped for her upcoming surgery.

Back in the ER, Jen’s chest was cracked open. A vascular clamp was placed on the descending portion of the aorta, with one end of the clamp sticking out of her chest. The pericardium was incised and the tamponade was relieved, but there was an active bleed in Jen’s chest cavity that Lindsay couldn’t find for the life of her. The incision site filled with blood over and over again, requiring multiple attempts at suction. Lindsay wrapped her hands around Jen’s heart, pumping it forcefully with her own two hands. “come on…come on…” Lindsay said under her breath, looking down at Jen. Jen was pasty white, and her eyes were still half open, staring blankly at the ceiling. “v-fib on the monitors Linds” nurse Nancy called out. “ok. Charge the internal paddles to 20!” Lindsay ordered. The large, spoon shaped paddles were handed to Lindsay, and the first shock was delivered. A dull, wet thump was heard. Jen’s heart stopped for a few seconds, then began fluttering again. “still in v-fib, I’m gonna hit her again at 30.” Dr Lindsay called out. The 2nd shock caused Jen’s toes to curl, showing off the soft, silky wrinkles throughout the soles of her size 7 feet. “damn it, still nothing. Resuming internal compressions.” Lindsay said frustrated, reaching her hands back into Jen’s bloody mess of a chest cavity.

Up in the OR, Carly was prepped for surgery. She was sedated, intubated, and had a blue bouffant cap placed, which almost matched her hair color. Carly’s surgery would have 2 teams working side by side- an orthopedics team to focus on her femur fracture, while a trauma surgery team focused on removing the spleen and repairing the partially torn artery. Carly’s belly was coated in betadine and the opening cut was made. Her abdomen was accessed by a paramedian incision. This was a vertical cut a few centimeters to the left of the abdominal midline. The goal of this was to expose the spleen and the injured artery more easily. A conventional midline incision would be more difficult since more tissue would have to be retracted, and the rectus abdominis muscle would have to be separated, then put back together during closure. Upon entry to her abdomen, there wasn’t much blood loss. In the coming minutes, the stomach and surrounding tissues were retracted, and the spleen was able to be identified. Partial occlusion clamps were placed on the vasculature of the spleen to limit blood loss during the removal of the damaged organ.

Just as Carly’s surgery was getting started, Jen was still being coded back in the ER. “ok, shocking again at 30. Everyone clear!” Lindsay shouted, with the electric whirring of the internal paddles being heard. A dull, wet thunk was heard once the shock was delivered. Jen’s torso flopped in response while her eyes stared lifelessly off to the side. The blood soaked internal paddles were recharged to 30, and Lindsay shocked her patient again. Jen’s feet kicked up slightly, slamming back down in a millisecond, wrinkling the soles of her pretty feet. “still v-fib, shocking again.” Lindsay called out. The paddles were lowered back into Jen’s chest around her twitching heart, and the shock was delivered. The same wet ka-thunk was heard. Jen’s heart twitched and fluttered erratically for a few seconds before falling completely still. The monitors were flatlined, and Lindsay just stood there for a moment holding the internal paddles. She sighs, then puts the internal paddles back on the crash cart. “she’s gone. Time of death, 9:25am.” Lindsay says in a defeated tone, taking her bloody gloves off. The flatlined monitors were switched off and the ambu bag was detached from the ET tube. The EKG electrodes were disconnected from Jen’s chest and her eyes were gently shut for the final time. Her body was covered with a sheet, only leaving her toe tagged feet exposed, bringing a tragic end to her case. Nurse Heather went through Jen’s belongings that the medics brought in and saw that Jen’s phone was going nuts from her job. “hey Jen, hope everything’s ok. I heard there was a bad accident on 31 so take your time coming in today.” A female voice on one of the messages said, completely oblivious to the fact that Jen was the one in said accident, and just had her time of death called. Heather shook her head, “wow… we may have to reach out to them. Me and Nancy will see if we can track down a husband, boyfriend, parent- someone who’s related to her too.” Heather said to Lindsay. “yeah, get on that whenever you can. Death notifications are always hard, so let me know if you need me to step in.” Lindsay replied.

Fortunately, there was only 1 death in this tragic accident. The surgical team was able to repair Carly’s fractured femur via internal reduction and fixation. Carly would now have a rod and some pins in her leg, setting off metal detectors for the rest of her life, but she had a functioning leg. Her spleen was removed and the partially detached vessel was anastomosed to the aorta, and the extra vessels of the spleen were rerouted since it was removed. Carly had a long road of recovery ahead of her, but ultimately pulled through.

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fem-lit · 5 months

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WARNING! This post contains potentially upsetting, very detailed, graphic text descriptions of a chemical face peel.

Excerpt from The Beauty Myth (1990) by Naomi Wolf:

A “scalpel slave” in She magazine describes a face peel:

“Essentially, it is no different from a second-degree burn…. [It] makes you go brown and crispy, then a scab forms and drops off … [it] takes several hours because it is so poisonous and you can’t risk getting it into the bloodstream.” Dr. Thomas Rees minces no words: “Abrasion and peeling traumatizes [sic] the skin … with either procedure, the skin can be removed too deeply and result in an open wound …. deaths [from cardiac arrest] have followed a chemical peel … the skin is frozen [for dermabrasion] until it assumes a boardlike quality that facilitates the abrasion from a rotating wire brush impregnated with diamond particles.” (“Skin planing,” he informs the reader, “originated in World War II, done with sandpaper to remove shrapnel embedded in the skin.” Plastic surgery developed after World War I in reaction to wartime mutilations never witnessed before.) A woman who has witnessed skin planing said to an interviewer, “If we found that they were doing that to people in prison, there would be an international outcry and [the country] would be reported to Amnesty International for torture of the most horrific kind.” Chemical peeling, that “torture of the most horrific kind,” is up, according to Rees, 34 percent.

It is not easy to describe physical pain, and the words we agree on to convey it are rarely adequate. Society has to agree that a certain kind of pain exists in order to ease it. What women experience in the operating theater, under the mask of acid, laid out open to the mouth of the suction machine, passed out cold in wait for the bridge of the nose to be broken, is still private and unsayable.

#anti cosmetic surgery #tw violence #tw gore #naomi wolf #the beauty myth

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xtremememeteam · 2 years

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Absolute prayers up for Damar Hamlin. Horrid stuff, especially given how young he is.

People online making speculations but the only rough facts rn is that he required CPR and an AED (he stopped breathing and his heart stopped). He has a pulse but cannot breathe on his own and has been intubated (a tube inserted that attaches to a oxygen machine). He is in Critical Condition.

He is at a Level 1 trauma center at UC hospital here in cincinnati. This is a top of the line facility with a crash cart, full staff, 24/7 care, and a trauma/surgery center. Some cardiologist online speculate Commotio Cordis. This is a when the chest, specifically the heart area, is hit with such blunt force that the heart is put out of rhythm.

The fact of the matter is that NFL must do more to protect their players. From JJ Watt going into cardiac arrest, to Tua Tagovailoa having a whopping 3 concussions this year, and now a young 24 year old man who was drafted only a little less than 2 YEARS AGO, going down on the field.

I hope to the god in heaven and whatever protective dieties are out there that this man comes out alive. I hope that mother leaves the hospital with her son. I hope this man returns to his family, full of head and heart. And I hope to god that the NFL players association raises hell with the NFL board for the shit show that has been this season.

#Damar Hamlin #Buffalo Bills #Cincinnati Bengals #NFL

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dramatic-shitpost-poet · 1 year

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🦌: hi im back :-) gonna throw headcanons at ya

i love the hc of putty being terrified of needles and hospitals in general. he would force stephanie to come with him on appointments. man would have to be restrained to get a shot. id imagine he just hates the sterile environment and the equipment and just feeling violated.

he would absolutely despise being stuck in a hospital bed and feel so miserable, especially when he had a serious heart surgery. In the first couple of days he would have to be pushed in a wheelchair and feels like a senile old man. he doesn’t like people doing things for him when he can’t do anything to the point when stephanie would have to help him taking his socks off and on.

orel would visit him once in a while and even make him a card or give some kind of gift. steph and orel would help take care of their old man <33

Hey! Nice to see you! I saw your ask this morning and it gave me motivation to finish my cardiology research (which I posted before this!).

I got HCs and info done for Revs that I could do as a separate post but.. I'll do here lol.

Okay, so Revs is very much headcanoned to have heart issues due to his stress and shit diet. A lot of these details including how stress affects the heart and his IBS are discussed in other places. I think around 70s (say.. 72) I think his heart issues come to an all time hgh due to stress, depression, his shitty diet, and general old age weakened. I believe out of the range of heart disorders, he would have one similar most to a heart attack or have blockage issues in his arteries due to said shitty diet and also on and off smoking, both contributing heavy to it. His emotional stress wears him down to the point all his muscles weaken more and this all combines into a myocardia infarction (heart attack).

I would say it's a more survival able one, but he would start experiencing symptoms such as chest pains, shortness of breath, feeling dizzy when moving too fast, and indigestion/his IBS getting worse. He would have these symptoms daily, but not notice or take care of it, simply out of motivational energy issues and a slight fear of going to seek professional help as he is so insecure that reaching for any medical help terrifies him on a phobia level (also embarrassing for him) and like he deserved to suffer, that he will not receive any actual help, and others will see him as more pathetic. This builds up daily and he also does not bother listening or taking note of any arrhythmias as well.

It comes to the heart attack point where I think it'd be early morning on a non-church day and his pain would get so bad that he would call Stephanie for help. She then takes him to a hospital and he probs has a panic attack about it which makes everything WORSE. He goes in and is hooked up to an EKG after being pinned down where it is monitored that he is having a heart attack/the start of one. The doctors then talk to him and Steph a bit before he is told he needs surgery to clear out his arteries. He freaks out MORE, but Stephanie reassures him and he gets a coronary artery blockage removal/bypass (one performed by a cardiac surgeon). The surgery is 3-6 hours roughly.

Coronary artery surgery specifics: the surgeon cuts open the center of the chest and spreads open the rib cage to expose the heart. The heart is then temporarily stopped and the patient is kept alive through a heart-lung machine that acts as his heart and lungs without the action organs moving. The surgeon takes a section of a healthy blood vessel (either heart or leg) and attaches it around the blocked area to create a new pathway of blood flow.

His recovery time would be roughly about 4-5 months and he would be required to be monitored in the hospital for 2 days. Cardiac rehab would also be months long to get you functioning again. During the time in the hospital you will have hourly vitals and temperature checks. Also you might have a breathing tube for a while and there are recovery things you need to do too.

This includes not smoking, eating more healthy, and exercise. I think it's mostly the first two for Revs. Oh and stress management. But he's such a stubborn bastard that Stephanie or someone else is gonna have to force him to do things and chances are I think Revs is going to cry the second he's not as high from the drugs from surgery as he feels so stupid and worthless. There's also check up appointments every 3 weeks about, then yearly over time. Day one of bypass recovery you start drinking liquids again, then are encourage to sit up and cough to prevent lung infections. Day two is walking around at your own pace and solid foods. Discharge has schedules and meds established. 6 weeks after surgery you can start driving yourself again and doing other things including the sex (I am including this for fanfic purposes) and 12 weeks, you are mostly functional again. Mood swings are very common and depression can get worse, so support systems are needed (This is also for fanfic purposes). Revs would go through all stated above and not have any other problems until he reaches lates 80s and 90s where he might have another heart attack as he is stubborn and stressed, but it isn't as survivable. Haven't thought that far.

#reverend putty #moral orel #reverend rod putty #rod putty #moral orel fandom #moral orel fanfic #hyperfixations #cardiology #heart discussion #anon #same anon #thanks anon!

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mercury-healthcare · 1 year

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Medical Equipment Manufacturer and Supplier in India

In the field of healthcare, the quality and reliability of medical equipment play a vital role in delivering effective and efficient patient care. Mercury Healthcare, a leading Medical Equipment Manufacturer and supplier in India, has emerged as a trusted name in the industry. With its commitment to excellence, innovation, and customer satisfaction, Mercury Healthcare has been revolutionizing the healthcare landscape in India. In this blog post, we will explore why Mercury Healthcare is renowned for providing the finest quality medical equipment in the country.

Commitment to Quality: Mercury Healthcare is dedicated to producing medical equipment of the highest quality standards. The company adheres to stringent quality control processes at every stage of manufacturing, ensuring that all products meet international quality benchmarks. By using advanced technology and robust manufacturing practices, Mercury Healthcare ensures that its equipment is reliable, accurate, and durable.

Wide Range of Products: One of the key strengths of Mercury Healthcare is its extensive portfolio of medical equipment. The company offers a comprehensive range of products, including diagnostic equipment, surgical instruments, patient monitoring systems, imaging devices, and much more. Whether it’s a small clinic, a large hospital, or a research facility, Mercury Healthcare caters to the diverse needs of the healthcare industry.

Cutting-Edge Technology: Mercury Healthcare stays at the forefront of technological advancements in the medical field. The company invests in research and development to continuously improve its products and introduce innovative solutions. By integrating the latest technology into their equipment, Mercury Healthcare ensures accurate diagnoses, efficient treatments, and improved patient outcomes.

Customization and Personalization: Understanding that different healthcare facilities have unique requirements, Mercury Healthcare offers customization and personalization options. The company collaborates closely with its clients to understand their specific needs and tailor the equipment accordingly. This approach not only enhances the user experience but also optimizes workflow efficiency in healthcare settings

Compliance with Standards: Mercury Healthcare strictly adheres to national and international regulations and standards for medical equipment manufacturing. The company follows Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) guidelines and holds certifications such as ISO 13485:2016, ensuring that their products meet the highest quality and safety standards. This commitment to compliance instills confidence in customers, making Mercury Healthcare a trusted partner in the healthcare industry.

After-Sales Support and Service: Apart from manufacturing top-quality medical equipment, Mercury Healthcare places great emphasis on Hyper-Hypothermia Machine after-sales support and service. The company provides comprehensive technical assistance, training programs, and regular maintenance services to ensure the smooth functioning of the equipment. Their prompt and efficient customer service team is always ready to address any queries or concerns.

Conclusion: Mercury Healthcare stands out as a premier medical equipment manufacturer and supplier in India due to its unwavering commitment to quality, innovation, and customer satisfaction. With a wide range of products, cutting-edge technology, customization options, and adherence to stringent standards, Mercury Healthcare has earned the trust of healthcare professionals across the country. By choosing Mercury Healthcare, healthcare facilities can be assured of acquiring the finest quality medical equipment that contributes to delivering superior patient care.

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skippyv20 · 2 years

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Our Prayer List 🙏🏻❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend. She is awaiting results for pre-cancer test and we pray it is benign. We pray for good results.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend’s husband who has not been well.

Prayers and good thoughts for @truthseeker-blogger who is preparing to move and has yet to find a new place. Prayers for her legal issues to be quickly resolved.

Prayers and good thoughts for friend’s mom. She had a stress test that showed some issues, as well as some indication of a possible old heart attack. She has an appointment on March 16th with her cardiologist & we assume she'll need a cardiac catheterization & stents.

Prayers and good thoughts for formerlyroyal who has passed away unexpectedly. Prayers for her family and her loving pets.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend who has severe iron deficiency and the treatment is very harsh and makes her sick. Her husband has been unfaithful during her illness and her family is ignoring me. She feels very alone.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend and her mother who both have Covid.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend’s church friend’s husband who has passed away peacefully! Prayers for the family.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend’s family whose lineage is greatly affected by cancer in the family.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend’s brother in Spain. Unfortunately, over the past two days he has been having terrible pain in his toe and is needing high levels of pain relief. The doctors have decide to keep him on antibiotics. Prayers they work, and prayers for his partner.

Prayers and good thoughts for Baby Roy who has passed away. Praying for comfort for his parents, and family as they mourn his loss. Praying for Baby Roy as he makes his journey home to God. Prayers and good thoughts for our friend who suffered from sciatica. The sciatica has resolved itself now, but she has 4 ruptured disks, 2 of which are torn. They have done a laser ablation of the nerves in her upper lumbar region which helped some. Also, she has had several epidurals in her lower lumbar & sacroilliac joints but that hasn't helped. She has an appointment with a neurosurgeon on the 14th.

Prayer and good thoughts for our friend’s newborn grandson who was admitted to the NICU yesterday with a Group B Strep infection. Baby Elliott was intubated last night and placed on a ventilator. Please pray for him, his parents, and his grandmother.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend’s beloved nephew, Norbert. He is heartbroken after a breakup and is depressed.

Prayers and good thoughts for Rob who may have a re =tear in knee and need further surgery.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend who is going through a very difficult time. Her husband is divorcing her after 33 years. After the first hearing, the judge is having him give her so little that she will have no place she can afford to live, while he has already gotten himself a new house. She fears her attorney is firing her due to how emotional she is. The day after the first hearing she had to go to the hospital for kidney failure, she has stage 4 heart failure, a tumor in her lung and leg. Please pray for judge to rule in her favour.

Prayers and good thoughts our friend’s brother in law. He has severe heart failure and he had colon cancer removed last nov. He must get chemo to be put on heart life saving machine but heart is too weak for chemo. This is his 3rd week in the hospital and the prognosis is he might live a couple months. Prayers and good thoughts for our friend who has been battling depression long-term due to trauma and the resulting difficult circumstances.

Prayers and good thoughts for Karen. She has been through much medically, and her sister is worried about her mentally handling changes.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend’s little boy who will be going through treatment for speech impediment. We pray for his quick success.

Prayers and good thoughts for our dear friend whose disability renewal was denied. She has another battle ahead.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend’s father who has been diagnosed with early stage dementia.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend’s son-in-law’s mother. She has cancer in her spine, leg and lung. She will be having surgery on her spine. This woman raised 4 boys by herself, her now 23 year old son is severely autistic and needs 24/7 care, which his mom has provided him his entire life. She is only 64 years old, a wonderful person, warm, loving and very independent. My heart breaks for her. Please also pray for my son in law - he is in the Navy, fortunately stationed only a few hours from his mom. He has power of attorney for his mom and his brother’s care - he has some very difficult and no doubt heart wrenching decisions to make.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend’s friend whom was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer called Myelodysplastic Syndrome, or MDS is now in remission. She is still doing chemo and is still waiting for the bone marrow transplant.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend’s daughter who is struggling. She is in much pain mentally. We prayer for her family as well as they try desperately to help her.

Prayers and good thoughts for our friend who is battling an undiagnosed mental illness which led to decisions with consequences. Praying for her to stay strong in faith, for her family issues to be resolved. Also, for her to be free of financial hardship.

Prayers and good thoughts for Baby James and his heart brother Matthew. Also their heart brother Conrad

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shadsasaur · 2 years

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TW PET EVERYTHING MEDICAL HORROR AGAIN UPDATE

monday we get in to see the best surgeon in province [AND THE ONLY VET IN PROVINCE WITH A CT SCAN, WE LITERALLY HAD NO CHOICE TO GO HERE DESPITE HAVING A BAD EXPERIENCE WITH THEM BEFORE. WE WERE TOLD BOOKING THROUGH REFERALS WOULD BE DIFFERENT]. we talk for a bit, shes optimistic, it'd be the second one she'd removed this week actually. she says they'll get us estimates. they say we can do a cardiac workup rn, a ct tomorrow, and amputate the full limb wednesday. they slap us with this.

[the first is cardiac workup, the second is CT, the third is the amputation]

i have a breakdown in the room. we had been warned to expect 6000-8000 total, not 16k. receptionist checks on us, i say as much, get told "well, this is gold star treatment we'd like. honestly the first is completely optional, we'll just err on the side of caution and use heart safe drugs for the CT if you'd like to skip it." we do skip it. we book the CT anyway. we have to know.

monday night at 8pm she eats and starts fasting. tuesday at 8 she is dropped off. we are told she'll be done "early afternoon" check the box saying "text us pics and updates during the day!" 6pm, we have heard NOTHING. we call back in distress saying "please tell us about our cat its been 10 hours and she hasnt eaten for 22".

we drive over. we here someone say remove toopys catheter and we're like ??? why has she had one in for this long after her CT. its been hours. you didnt call us?? how long would oyu have left my cat starving and suffering in fear if we hadnt shown up??? we wait 10 minutes, me crying upset while the worst shortfaced bulldog that keeps choking on every breath and 3 other randos are there. someone comes over, tells us "the doctor is too busy and can't talk to you tonight. she'll call you tomorrow. your surgery can be thursday instead" and hands us the debit machine and a paper.

YOU KNOW. THE KIND OF NEWS YOU WANT TO UNCEREMONIOUSLY HAND A PERSON IN A WAITING ROOM WITH A BUNCH OF STRANGERS AROUND WHILE TAKING THEIR MONEY.

i have a full breakdown. we finally get our terrified starving cat and leave.

all wednesday, we hear NOTHING.

today/thursday morning, lex is so mad and he calls. he gets told she'll call us when she finds time.

she finally calls us back after lunch, confirms it is indeed A Lot of cancer, that should not have been given that paper without anyone to talk to us, it is inoperable, what we can see is 20% of what it is. she walks us through drugs she's giving us for palliative care mode. i ask if its 20%, does this mean it started deeper and we noticed because it pushed out. she confirms that yes, there is no way it was treatable after it became visible, so us feeling guilty about not catching it earlier was unfounded. we did everything as best we could. we could not have changed this.

so yeah. painkillers and a painkilling anxiety pill for a while. we have to Make The Hard Decision when it grows large enough to press on her organs and either affect her going to the bathroom, or her breathing.

she doesnt fucking deserve this.

#despair posting

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radioactiveradley · 1 year

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FACT 4

Different modalities look at different stuff!

Ooh ooch me bones? Plain-film X-Ray or (if it's gnarly) CT!

Ooh ooch me soft tissues? Ultrasound, MRI, or CT depending on what & where! Or even X-Ray for detection of stuff like small bowel obstructions!

Ooh ooch me swallowing/digestion? Fluoroscopy!

Ooh ooch me spine/brain? MRI (unless it's 'ooh ooch me ischemic/haemorrhagic stroke or head trauma - then we'll whoosh you into CT for a quick whizz in the washing machine (gantry. it's called a gantry. shh))

Ooh ooch me heart? Echocardiography (Ultrasound), Coronary Angiography and Cardiac CT!

Ooh ooch me malignancy? Can be picked up anywhere, but will probably be biopsied with Ultrasound, CT, or even MRI depending on what & where!

Ooh ooch me need surgery? X-ray and/or fluoroscopic-style screening to watch what the surgical instruments or contrast agents are doing inside you in real-time!

#radiography #medblr #radiology #teehee

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takeeachdayonebookatatime · 1 year

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Why did you elbow me? 114

Achilles Castle part 19

Chief Brady: pov I get off the phone with their parents who are very angry. Their parents finally arrive to pick them up, I tell them your sons are very lucky because Kate is not pressing charges. But they will have to pick up trash from the beach for a week as a punishment. Lanie says she is going to take her to the ER as a precaution. Castle calls ahead to let them know Lanie is bringing Kate in. Esposito offers to drive them there Jim is going with them. After talking with Kate for a few minutes the boys apologize. After the boys leave Lanie says to Bronson she will keep him updated.

Kate: pov Alexis runs upstairs and gets me some clothes i can change into Lanie helps me change into the shirt and pants and out of my bathing suit. Esposito is carrying me out to the car. He is driving us there, the ride to the hospital is short since there is not much traffic. Esposito finds a parking spot in the ER parking lot. Lanie helps me out of the car, Esposito is carrying me inside the hospital since I don't feel good. At the front desk my dad is handed forms to fill out. Dr Crane and nurse Suzanne are waiting for us. I'm taken into an exam room, the walls are a pretty yellow color. They mention the scans I had last time I was here looked good concussion wise, so they are not worried about that.

Dr Crane: pov Lanie fills me in on what happened, Esposito puts Kate on the exam table, nurse Suzanne grabs a blood pressure cuff to check her blood pressure. She then checks Kate's temperature, Suzanne hooks Kate up to the heart and pulse ox-meter and checks her other vitals. Lanie mentions she gave her a dose of her meds at the house. I listen to her heart and lungs, I suggest we take Kate for some scan to see how everything is looking.

Nurse Suzanne: pov Kate is taken to the scan room on the cardiac ward. Once she is settled on the exam bed/table. I start the EKG and put the wires/leads on her chest and start the machine. Dr Crane says It is slightly elevated but not too bad. Next Is the Echocardiogram, the ultrasound machine is brought over. Dr Crane squirts the cold gel on Kate's chest and moves the wand around over her heart. So far so good, he pages for a specialist to come look Kate over.

Dr Wendy Blair: pov Dr Crane asked if I could look at his heart patient. In the exam room I'm introduced to Kate, her father Jim, and her friends Lanie and Esposito. Before I examine Kate I ask some general health questions. I've been informed that Kate has a heart condition. Lanie says yes Kate has a form of ventricular tachycardia in her left ventricle. I ask how long she has had it Lanie mentions a few years. I ask if anyone else in her family has heart problems, Lanie tells me Kate has previous chest trauma from a shooting years ago it was at her Captain's funeral she was giving the eulogy when it happened. Requiring her to have emergency heart surgery.

Kate: pov The Dr is concerned because I may have swallowed some water at the beach and he wants me to make sure my lungs are clear. Dr Wendy Blair asks if I have any lung or breathing problems. Lanie is telling the Dr. How i have an issue with my left pulmonary vein and have had a collapsed lung before on the left side. Lanie mentions that my immune system is not that great. Dr Wendy Blair listens to my lungs which sound fine, she orders a chest x-ray for me just to make sure my lungs are clear. And IV is inserted into my arm.

Lanie: pov they are taking her for a chest x-ray I follow the gurney to the scan room. I'm waiting with the technician in the booth, Kate did so amazing. Dr Crane mentions for the time being Kate is being admitted for monitoring until he gets the scan results. The specialist Dr Wendy Blair has to look at them, in her room Kate is getting comfortable. The specialist and Dr Crane walk in Kate's room to go over the scans with us. They say everything looks good, they just want to monitor her until lunch, because of her cardiac history. Dr Burkett is being updated by Dr Crane on how she is doing. Esposito updates Castle and the rest of the group, I mention our group had plans for after lunch. We were going to the mall so Sarah Grace, our co-workers daughter, could go to build a bear workshop. Both Doctors said depending on how it goes with Kate it should be fine as long as Kate takes it easy.

Jim: pov Dr Wendy Blair wants to give Katie some preventive meds since she has a weak immune system. Once the meds are in Katie is asleep, Esposito is going to get us food while Katie sleeps. Dr Wendy mentions walking will help Katie but keep it short. Esposito arrives back at the hospital with tacos for us 3. The food is amazing.

Martha: pov Ryan is making sandwiches for lunch with chips on the side. Castle says Katherine should be back after lunch from what Esposito said. The Dr's said everything looks good but we will have to keep a close eye on Kate.

Ryan: pov I grab stuff out of the fridge to make sandwiches for the group, Alexis and Sarah Grace are filling the cups up with peach tea. All of us sit down at the dining room table to eat, we chat while we eat. Sarah Grace is saying how much fun she is having at the beach.

Esposito: pov Kate is now up Dr Wendy Blair and Dr Crane are saying Kate's vitals look great. A nurse brings in some oatmeal for her to eat. Both Dr's mention keeping a close eye on Kate in case she develops symptoms. If you feel like she needs it you can always ask the mall for a wheelchair or she can use Castle's if he is using his crutches. Lanie and the Dr's go over possible things Kate could get from her swallowing the water. Lanie mentions the possible symptoms she might have if she gets sick. To be continued. ……….

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mariacallous · 2 years

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Jack Welch, the former C.E.O. of General Electric, was “a plainspoken, homespun dynamo—a pugnacious gnome with a large bald head and piercing eyes that made him as instantly recognizable as Elon Musk is today,” Malcolm Gladwell writes, in an entertaining and probing piece in this week’s issue. “He was called the greatest C.E.O. of the modern age,” Gladwell notes, but he was, by modern standards, a difficult leader: one who “seemed to enjoy firing people,” who “was most comfortable reducing anything of value to a transaction,” and who spent years exploiting a loophole in corporate finance to amass riches for the company—only to have his scheme come crashing down during the 2008 financial crisis. How have his words and actions endured as corporate legend? What wisdom—or folly—has he imparted? Consider this: in 1995, at the peak of his career, Welch suffered a devastating heart attack. He would end up living for nearly twenty-five more years, but at the time, death seemed imminent. A priest wanted to give him last rites; his doctor operated a second time. What, then, constituted the dying man’s thoughts? “Damn it, I didn’t spend enough money.”

In late April of 1995, Jack Welch suffered a crippling heart attack. He was then in full stride in his spectacular run as the C.E.O. of General Electric. He had turned the company from a sleepy conglomerate into a lean and disciplined profit machine. Wall Street loved him. The public adored him. He was called the greatest C.E.O. of the modern age. He was a plainspoken, homespun dynamo—a pugnacious gnome with a large bald head and piercing eyes that made him as instantly recognizable as Elon Musk is today.

But, that spring, his fabled energy seemed to flag. He found himself taking naps in his office. He went out to dinner one night with some friends at Spazzi, in Fairfield, Connecticut, for wine and pizza. Then, when he got home and was brushing his teeth, it happened. Boom. His wife rushed him to the hospital at 1 a.m., running a red light along the way. When they arrived, Welch jumped out of his car and onto a gurney, shouting, “I’m dying, I’m dying!” An artery was reopened, but then it closed again. A priest wanted to give him last rites. His doctor operated a second time. “Don’t give up!” Welch shouted. “Keep trying!”

The great C.E.O.s have an instinct for where to turn in a crisis, and Welch knew whom to call. There was Henry Kissinger, who had survived a triple bypass in the nineteen-eighties, and was always willing to lend counsel to the powerful. And, crucially, the head of Disney, Michael Eisner, one of the few C.E.O.s on Welch’s level. Just a year earlier, Eisner had survived an iconic C.E.O. cardiac event: a bout of upper-arm pain and shortness of breath that began at Herb Allen’s business conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, and ended with Eisner staring God in the face from his bed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles. The first chapter of Eisner’s marvellous autobiography, “Work in Progress” (1998), is devoted to the story of his ordeal, complete with references to Clint Eastwood, Michael Ovitz, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, Sid Bass, Barry Diller, John Malone, Michael Jordan, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, David Geffen, “my friend” Dustin Hoffman, Tom Brokaw, Robert Redford, Annie Leibovitz, Steven Spielberg, and at least three prominent cardiologists. In one moment of raw vulnerability, he called his wife over to ask about the doctor who was slated to do his surgery: “Where was this guy trained?” he asked. He explains, “She knew I was hoping to hear Harvard or Yale.” No such luck. “ ‘Tijuana,’ she replied, with a straight face.”

The point is that when a corporate legend has a blocked artery, expectations are high. So after Welch published his own memoirs, the enormous best-seller “Jack: Straight from the Gut” (2001), one of the first questions that interviewers on his book tour wanted to ask was what he had learned from his brush with death.

In an interview Welch gave in 2001 for the PBS show “CEO Exchange,” hosted by Stuart Varney, Varney brought up his quintuple bypass.

Varney: Was that a real change in life for you? A change in perhaps your spiritual approach?

Welch: No.

In the Eisnerian tradition, a heart attack is an opportunity to take stock, to reassess—to perform a kind of psychic stock repurchase. Eisner was certain he’d glimpsed that kind of emotional recalibration when Welch phoned him that day from his sickbed and peppered him with questions about what he was facing. Eisner recalled years later, “As I was talking to him, I was thinking, Oh. This tough man’s human.”

So it’s understandable that Varney tried again, asking him whether he was moved by a sense of his own mortality.

Welch: You know what I thought, Stuart? Larry Bossidy, my friend at AlliedSignal, asked me, he said, “Jack, what were you thinking of just before they cut you?” I said, “Damn it, I didn’t spend enough money.”

Varney: No. Now wait a minute. Wait a minute. Hold on. Hold on.

Welch: I did.

Varney: No, no.

Welch: I did.

Most C.E.O.s, in their public appearances, are circumspect, even guarded. Welch was the opposite, which explains why he has been the subject of so much attention and scholarly interest. There were boxcars full of books written about him during his time at the helm of G.E., still more during his long retirement (some of them written by Welch himself), and even today, in the wake of his death, in 2020, the financial writer William D. Cohan has delivered the absorbing seven-hundred-page opus “Power Failure” (Portfolio), a book so comprehensive it gives the impression that all that can be said about Jack has finally been said.

Then again, maybe not. He was kind of irresistible:

Varney: It never crossed your mind that this is a major event? Your life is threatened.

Welch: It happened so fast that I honestly didn’t think that. We all are products of our background. And I didn’t have two nickels to rub together, so I’m relatively cheap. And I always bought relatively cheap wine. And I always looked at the wine price in the restaurant. And I could never, I swore to God I’d never buy a bottle of wine for less than a hundred dollars. That was absolutely one of the takeaways from that experience.

Varney: After the operation, you would not buy a bottle of wine for under a hundred dollars. And before the operation you wouldn’t be seen dead drinking a bottle of wine over a hundred dollars.

Welch: Right.

Varney: Is that it?

Welch: That’s about it.

By midsummer, Welch was in the office, doing deals. In mid-August—a scant three months after his bypass—he made the finals of a tournament at the illustrious Sankaty Head Golf Club, on Nantucket.

General Electric was formed in 1892, out of the various electricity-related business interests of Thomas Edison, the most storied of all American inventors. J. P. Morgan was the banker who put the deal together; the Vanderbilt family was involved, too. From the beginning, G.E. was resolutely blue-chip. In the course of the twentieth century, it was G.E., more than, say, A.T. & T. or General Motors, that was the preëminent American corporation. It was the stock that grandmothers from Greenwich owned.

During the nineteen-seventies, the company was run by the English-born Reginald Jones, a tall, austere man who was once named the most influential businessman in the country by his peers in corporate America. “Reg Jones, who is decisive, elegant, and dignified, is also described by GE people as sensitive and human; and the affection the GE family has for him is obvious,” Robert L. Shook wrote in his book “The Chief Executive Officers: Men Who Run Big Business in America,” from 1981. “He’s quick to praise and hand out credit,” one executive told Shook. “He’ll always say, ‘I don’t do it all by myself.’ ”

Jones made two hundred thousand dollars a year and lived in a modest Colonial in Greenwich. Jimmy Carter twice tried to get him to join his Cabinet. Several times a year, Jones would travel to Harvard Business School and then to Wharton, at the University of Pennsylvania, to take the pulse of the schools where the next generation of G.E.’s leadership was almost certainly incubating. The bookshelf in his office held volumes devoted to sociology, philosophy, business, and history.

“The General Electric culture is best exemplified by the concern we have for each other,” Jones told Shook. “Let’s say one of our fellows has a problem—perhaps a serious illness or a death in the family. I will usually do what I can for the family. And here we think that is quite natural.”

Within two years of securing the top job, in 1972, Jones was already planning for his succession. And, from the beginning, he could not take his eyes off a young manager at G.E.’s operations in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, who ran the company’s metallurgical and chemical divisions. As Jones confided to a labor historian years later:

I went to the vice president in charge of the executive manpower development and I said give me a list of the contenders for my job! And he gave me a list with 17, 18 people on it. And I looked at the list and I said, well, you don’t have Jack Welch there? Well, he said, well he’s so young. He’s kind of a, you know, not a typical G.E. guy. He’s a bit of a wild man and so on and so forth. I said, put his name on the list.

Why was Jones so drawn to Welch? The conventional criticism of hiring at the upper echelons of corporate America is that like tends to promote like. The Dartmouth grad who summers in Kennebunkport meets the young Williams grad who summers in Bar Harbor and declares, By golly, that young man has the right stuff! But in deciding to turn G.E. over to Welch, Jones was replacing himself with his opposite. Cohan writes:

“He was regal,” explained one former GE executive. “Jones just had an aura about him. I remember being in a room and when he walked in, it was like the king walked in.” Where Jones was reserved, Jack was gregarious. Jones was tall—six foot four—while Jack was short—five foot eight on a good day. . . . Around GE going to see Reg Jones was like going to see the president in the Oval office. Going to see Jack was like going to see a fraternity brother at a tailgate party.

Welch did not view General Electric as one big, warm family. He thought it was bloated and senescent. Jones was known for calling people when they lost a loved one. Welch seemed to enjoy firing people. It is quite possible, in fact, that no single corporate executive in history has fired as many people as Jack Welch did. He laid off more than a hundred thousand workers in the first half of the nineteen-eighties. There are lots of sentences in Cohan’s “Power Failure” like this: “Ten thousand people, or half the people who once worked there, were let go.” Or: “McNerney got the job after a rather infamous annual managers’ meeting in Boca Raton in January 1991, when Jack fired four division C.E.O.s. ‘You could have heard a pin drop,’ McNerney recalled.” Or, of an air-conditioning business in Louisville that Welch did not like, and subsequently sold off:

“This was a flawed business,” he continued. But the people in Louisville who made the air conditioners took pride in them and were shocked when the business was sold to Trane. “It really shook up Louisville,” he said.

He did not feel their pain. Quite the contrary.

Cohan gives us a lot of alpha-male straight talk, like the time Welch cornered Ken Langone, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot, at a party at Larry Bossidy’s house in Florida, not far from Welch’s own place in North Palm Beach.

“Jack, get off my fucking ass. No business tonight,” Langone said. But Jack wouldn’t take no for an answer.

“I need five minutes,” Jack insisted. They went to Bossidy’s backyard. “The party’s inside,” Langone said. “He puts me against the fucking wall. He said, ‘I want you to go on the GE board.’ I said, ‘What?!?!’ ”

Reginald Jones, one imagines, never backed anyone up against a wall. And he would never have been caught dead in North Palm Beach.

Did he see something in Welch that he could not find in himself? Was he so critical of his own tenure at America’s flagship corporation that he felt a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn was in order? The most charitable explanation is that the transition from Jones to Welch came at the end of one of the more unsettling decades in the history of American capitalism, and Jones may have felt that the sun had set on his brand of corporate paternalism.

After Welch, at age forty-five, was named the new C.E.O. of General Electric, Jones called him into his office to bestow some final words of wisdom. Another recent book about Welch, David Gelles’s “The Man Who Broke Capitalism” (Simon & Schuster), recounts the exchange:

“Jack, I give you the Queen Mary,” Jones said. “This is designed not to sink.”

Jack didn’t miss a beat.

“I don’t want the Queen Mary,” he snapped back. “I plan to blow up the Queen Mary. I want speedboats.”

Then Jones threw his successor a party at the Helmsley Palace Hotel, in midtown Manhattan, where Welch had a few too many cocktails and slurred his way through his remarks to the group. The next morning, Jones stormed into Welch’s office. “I’ve never been so humiliated in my life,” he told Welch. “You embarrassed me and the company.” Welch worried that he would be fired, losing his chance at glory before it had even begun. Cohan writes, “He was despondent for the next four hours.” By lunch, apparently, he had put his existential crisis behind him. That’s our Jack.

Welch believed that the responsibility of a corporation was to deliver predictable and generous returns to its shareholders. In pursuit of this goal, he exploited a loophole in the regulatory architecture of corporate finance. Companies that made things—companies such as G.E.—had long been permitted to lend money to their customers. They could behave like banks, in other words, but they weren’t really banks. Banks were encumbered by all kinds of regulations that had the effect of limiting their profit margins. The markets considered them risky, so they paid dearly to raise capital. But blue-chip G.E. had none of those burdens, which meant that, when it came to making money, Welch’s non-bank bank could put real banks to shame. He then used the proceeds from G.E. Capital to acquire hundreds of companies. In the warm glow of G.E.’s riches, Welch articulated a series of principles that captivated his peers. Fire nonperformers without regret. Shed any business that isn’t first or second in its market category. Your duty is always to enrich your shareholders.

In his interview with Varney, Welch took a question from the audience about how, in enacting these principles, a C.E.O. could tell the difference between leaders who create an “edge” and those who simply create “fear.” Welch explained that there were four types of manager:

One who has the values and makes the numbers: love them, hug them, take them onward and upward.

Second one doesn’t have the values, doesn’t make the numbers, get them out of there. That’s easy, too.

The third one has the values, doesn’t make the numbers, give them a second and third chance.

The fourth one’s the one you’re talking about. The tough one. The horse’s neck that makes the numbers on the backs of people. The go-to person in an organization. And an organization that doesn’t root them out, can’t talk about values, can’t talk about the human equation.

In a perfect world, the interviewer would have asked a follow-up question: What are these “values” that you’re talking about? Surely the desire to meet Wall Street’s quarterly estimates—as much as it felt like a value in Welch’s universe—does not amount to an actual moral belief system. And then perhaps a second follow-up: Doesn’t the fourth category—the “tough” manager who makes the numbers but does not have the values—sound a lot like you, Mr. Welch?

But few ever asked questions like that of Welch. So the man himself remains opaque, and the best we can do is try to piece together the clues scattered throughout “Power Failure.”

One time in Welch’s senior year of high school, his hockey team lost to a crosstown rival, and Jack, who had scored his team’s only two goals, threw his stick in anger. Cohan writes:

Next thing he knew, his mother was in the locker room. She bounded right up to him, oblivious to the fact that the guys around her were in various states of undress. She grabbed him by the jersey in front of everyone. “You punk,” she yelled at him. “If you don’t know how to lose, you’ll never know how to win. If you don’t know this, you don’t belong anywhere.” He paused for a moment, recalling the memory. “She was a powerhouse,” he said. “I loved her beyond comprehension.”

After college, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of Illinois. His thesis was on condensation in nuclear power plants. “I thought it was the most important thing in my life,” he tells Cohan. For many people, years of immersion in a complex intellectual endeavor would leave an imprint. Not for Welch. Condensation in nuclear power plants does not come up again.

Golf, by contrast, was “one of the few constants in Jack’s life,” Cohan writes. “One way or another, there was always golf.” But did he like the game for its own sake? Or was it simply, to adapt Clausewitz’s dictum, the continuation of business by other means? After Welch left G.E., the details of his retirement package were made public. It included a pension of $7.4 million a year and a mountain of perks. He got the use of a company Boeing 737, at an estimated cost of $3.5 million a year. He got an apartment in Donald Trump’s 1 Central Park West, plus deals at the restaurant Jean-Georges downstairs, courtside seats at Knicks games, a subsidy for a car and driver, box seats at the Metropolitan Opera, discounts on diamond and jewelry settings, and on and on—all this for someone worth an estimated nine hundred million dollars. And then, finally, G.E. agreed to pay the monthly dues at the four golf clubs where he played. It would be nice to hear from the high-priced attorney who negotiated that last line item. Would it have been a deal breaker? Did Welch believe golf had been so central to his performance as C.E.O. that it made sense for the company’s shareholders to pay those monthly dues?

A few months after he recovered from his bypass surgery, Welch went to see his heart surgeon, Cary Akins. They had become friends. “He was incredibly cordial for somebody who was that powerful,” Akins tells Cohan. Welch had wanted the operation to be done on a Friday, so that he would have three days of recovery under his belt before the news hit the stock market—and Akins obliged. Now Welch wanted to talk.

“You’re doing great,” Akins told him.

“Well, go ahead and ask your question,” Jack said.

“What?” Akins replied.

“Go ahead and ask your question,” he said again.

“What do you mean?” Akins responded, genuinely confused.

“Well, I presume you’re gonna want me to give you some money,” Jack said.

“You didn’t pay your bill?” Akins replied.

“Come on, now,” Jack said. “You must have thought about this. Do you want me to donate something?”

“Jack, it never crossed my mind,” Akins replied.

Akins had performed a feat of skill, born of professional dedication. Welch saw a shakedown in the offing. And maybe that’s the key: Welch was most comfortable reducing anything of value to a transaction. He gave Akins a generous donation—though it came from G.E.’s charitable foundation, not from his own pocket.

It has become fashionable to deride today’s tech C.E.O.s for their grandiose ambitions: colonizing Mars, curing all human disease, digging a world-class tunnel. But shouldn’t we prefer these outsized delusions to the moral impoverishment of Welch’s era?

“In all of our many discussions, the only time he spoke about his children was when he told me that he ‘loved them to pieces’ but that he had made ‘a mistake’ when he gave each of them a bunch of G.E. stock when he first became C.E.O.,” Cohan writes. Because the stock had performed well, they each had something like fifty million dollars in company shares. Although two of his four kids went to Harvard Business School and one went to Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, they all quit their jobs, disappointing their father. “They turned out differently than I’d hoped,” Welch tells Cohan. “We’re close. But they got too much money. . . . If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t have given it to them.” A father reflects, after a lifetime, on his troubled relationship with his children, and concludes that he should have adjusted their compensation.

As Welch prepared for retirement from G.E., in 2001, the search for his successor became a public spectacle. He identified three plausible internal candidates. Their faults and their strengths were openly debated. The financial press was riveted. The choice was up in the air until the last minute, when Welch settled on Jeff Immelt, who was then running G.E.’s health-care unit. Welch had had his eye on Immelt for a long time. Years before, Welch had sent him to Louisville, to run G.E.’s sprawling appliance-manufacturing hub there. The job was stressful, and Immelt’s weight hit two hundred and eighty pounds. “You’re never going to be C.E.O. if you don’t lose weight,” Cohan reports Welch telling him. “You’ve got to get your fucking weight down. Can’t have everybody fucking fat.”

When Immelt took over from Welch, he addressed a gathering of top G.E. managers in Boca Raton. “Only time will tell if Jack is the best business leader ever, but I know he is one of the greatest human beings I have ever met,” Immelt said. But by that point the Welch legend was so huge that such blandishments seemed obligatory.

What Immelt quickly discovered was that Welch had handed him a mess: a company built out of pieces that had no logical connection. Once the global financial crisis arrived, the elaborate game that Welch had been playing with G.E. Capital collapsed. Wall Street woke up to the fact that a non-bank was every bit as risky as a real bank, and the company never quite recovered. Immelt was eventually forced out, in disgrace. Almost two decades after Welch handed the reins to Immelt, Cohan met Welch for lunch at the Nantucket Golf Club. All Welch wanted to talk about was how terrible a job he thought his successor had done. The share price had collapsed, and Welch was disconsolate.

“He’s full of shit,” Jack said. “He’s a bullshitter.”

“But Jack,” I asked, “didn’t you choose Jeff?”

Yes, he conceded, he had. “That’s my burden that I have to live with,” he continued. “But people have been hurt. Employees. People’s pensions. Shareholders. It’s bad.” There were tears in his eyes. “I fucked up,” he said again. “I fucked up.”

As Cohan and Welch ate lunch, the golfer Phil Mickelson and the C.E.O. of Barclays came over to pay homage. Welch may have been long gone from the C-suite, but, in a certain kind of country-club dining room, he remained a rock star. Then Welch offered to drive Cohan back to his house, a few miles away. They got into Welch’s Jeep Cherokee, and Welch refused to put on his seat belt, so the warning bell chimed the whole ride back.

Off he drove. When he got to the left turn out of the Nantucket Golf Club, onto Milestone Road, he did something odd. Instead of keeping to the right side of Milestone Road, as other American drivers do, he decided to drive in the middle of the road, with the Cherokee straddling the yellow line. Needless to say, the drivers coming toward us on Milestone were freaking out. One after another, they all pulled off to the right onto the grassy edge of the street, giving Jack full clearance to continue driving down the middle of the road. He didn’t seem to notice. ♦

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