The Triage President
Wed Jan 16, 2008 at 01:13:48 PM PDT
Three men are injured on the street following a horrific car accident. The first is sitting up, conscious, with a severely cut arm; arterial blood spurts out on the ground. The second is semi-conscious and has a deep laceration to his chest; air bubbles from his lung rising up out of the blood. And the third man is unconscious but alive, breathing, but missing the front portion of his skull, and his eyes are fixed and dilated.
What is the order of treatment here? What triage strategy will you employ to try and save all three men?
George Bush is now, like it or not, our Triage President. He is charged with the sorting and handling of policy casualties, including such things as the extension of tax cuts for the wealthy, or exempting the U.S. Navy from exercising due care when testing sonar in the vicinity of whales, and most importantly the political/cultural devastation in Iraq that has cost so many American lives. Other examples are, as they say in the blood lab, TNTC (too numerous to count).
More below the fold.
In our scenario above, it is as if Mr. Triage has assessed the highway carnage and decided to move boldly ahead with his own unique strategy.
First, he stops at the man with a spurting artery and says, "Seems like you’re losin’ a lot of blood there. I’d better call an ambulance." Instead of taking off his belt and applying a tourniquet, Mr. Triage doesn’t know what a tourniquet is, let alone how to apply one.
Mr. Triage next steps up to the man with the sucking chest wound. "Hey, buddy, wake up -- I think you’re deflatin’ ... heh heh!" The injured man needs that hole plugged and a tight wrap around his chest now, but our Triager-in-Chief is too busy trying to figure out which numbers to dial to get 911 on his cell phone. He calls Rudy Giulliani, who begins and ends every sentence with "nine-eleven."
Mr. Triage then spots the third man. "Hold on, Rudy ... I think I see Frank!" He knows the guy, and rushes up to render assistance. There’s not a damned thing he can do for the guy, what with kindergarten through 12th grade splattered all over the highway, but Mr. Triage spends some quality time with his old buddy until the ambulance shows up. He holds his hand while talking religion, sports, and the state of politics in Antarctica to a guy who couldn’t hear an atom bomb explode nearby.
By the time the ambulance arrives, the 2nd guy has drowned in his own blood, the 1st guy dies on the way to the hospital from (preventable) massive blood loss, but that 3rd guy? He hangs on for twenty more years in a persistent vegetative state. Our Triage President, however, proudly takes credit for helping to save the guy’s life. The man’s family, for some strange reason, isn’t all that grateful.
Triage is about making the tough decisions and understanding the consequences – treating those who have the best chance for survival, and treating them in the right order. Our Triage President has shown himself unworthy to make such life and death decisions for the rest of us. It’s time for Congress to step in and cut Mr. Triage’s title to "orderly," where he can no longer do any damage in the operating room, but is well suited to reorganize the bed linens already thrice reorganized.
Permalink | 4 comments