[BC] Transmitter Safety

[Broadcast List USER]

This is just dumb.

My brother was in a horrific traffic accident one night.  The kid
driving him just had his face cut up, but the passenger's side of the
car ran into an abandoned school bus by the Interstate.  He shouldn't
have lived, but through a bunch of things coming together just right,
he did.  He spent three months in Intensive Care, then several more
in Critical Care, and finally got into a semi-private room.  He would
have gone into a nursing home, but instead got to move home where our
Mother is a Registered Nurse.

Though he had many surgeries and problems, the critical one was chest
trauma.  His aorta was totally severed so he should have bled out in
two minutes, but the rupture was inside the pericardial sac  The sack
filled with blood, showing his heart, and lowering his blood
pressure, so he was very lucky.  He was also lucky he was airlifted
to the right hospital.

Anyway, his heart was injured (to say the least).  His first
pacemaker was to speed up his slow heartbeat.  Soon after, because of
the problem of the pausing of his heartbeat, and fibrillation, he got
a defibrillating place maker.  When his heart slows down, it paces
him back up.  If he goes into fibrillation, it shocks him to stop it,
then paces him again to start it.  TV shows make you think the shock
starts the heart.  It doesn't.  The shock is actually to stop the
heart.  When the hart is fibrillating, the irregular heart beat has
to stop before it can be restarted correctly.

I was once watching a county public meeting and saw a guy getting
shocked.  EVEN HE thought it was the mic.  It wasn't.  It was his
defibrillating place maker.  Hey, they work.

Your friend needs to find a competent cardiologist and get the right
pacemaker installed.  It REALLY isn't a big deal.  They make a pouch
near the shoulder in the front for the brick, then "feed" the leads
to the heart.  When it is replaced, another pouch is made near the
OTHER shoulder, and it is installed on the other side.  New
pacemakers have batteries that last a LONG time, and they can be
monitored remotely, so it is very manageable.

Get him to a Doctor.

--chip

On Apr 28, 2008, at 3:01 PM, broadcast-request at radiolists.net wrote:

>Death is rough, but lesser damage can be almost as bad.  A TV
>engineer of my acquaintance woke up on the floor next to his
>transmitter one
>morning, as a result of a HV shock.  It's several years later now,
>his heart
>still just ups and stops at times, causing him to black out and