Medical Monday; A Synthetic Thoracotomy

It's been a busy few months at work (it's the NHS, when is it ever NOT busy) and whilst a lot of what I've been making is a bit... shall we say, graphic... to post on here, I thought I'd share this recent synthetic trainer I've knocked-up for the ED. Or Accident and Emergency, as we boringly used to call it. I don't know, maybe it's ED to make us more appealing to our prospective new American owners when we get privatised. Or Privatized, with a Z, as we'll be totally American-owned, not just the patient data.

Sorry, I'm rambling. So, the scenario was patient who'd been stabbed in the chest, nicking his heart. He dies on the table, and the Doctors have to crack open his chest and go-in for emergency heart surgery. Open the rib-cage and stop the heart bleeding. We do this on our CRISIS course, with whole pig torsos, which is graphic, if useful. That's in our lab, however, and wheeling a whole headless, legless pig through through the waiting room was likely to get us lynched, so I got asked if I could knock up a synthetic trainer.

After some thoughts, and experiments with plastic buckets, barrels and things, I thought about using a Rescusi Annie.

You know, these dudes/dudettes.

We have a full-body one, but it's too nice and useful to chop up. I remembered though that the legend that is Dr.Blood (yes, really) had a stack of knackered old Rescusi Annie torsos down in the basement of horrors which are the ED offices. Mainly because I dumped them down there a few years ago when we were desperate for space. I carried out a raid down there and retrieved them.

And here we are, this one is pretty representative of the state they were in, but then this would need to be a scrapper anyway.

Probably should have put the tigger warning here.

First pass at making a sternum, nice and strong... though I quickly realised this was stupid, as the point was to cut through it. A bit of strategic chopping later;

and a raid of the scrap pile, produced some cable troughing. All will be revealed in a few pictures time.

For the ribs, I turned to these ET tubes. These go out of date pretty quickly, and get dumped on us (as the robots aren't bothered about best-before-dates on medical equipment), and we had uggins -technical term- of them.

There's that cable-trough sternum.

I needed to chop-around the wooden supports to accommodate the pipes from the neck, as the patient would still have to be intubated.

That then left the problem of how to make a heart. It needed to be rubbery, and semi-flexible. I had some balloons left over from Scouts, and figured it would be best filled with wadding.

There was -unfortunately for him- a massive, old, rather over-stuffed teddybear sat up on the shelf in the workshop, intercepted on the way to be disposed of (long story, but we have a mass of teddies donated for Peadiatric sims, and nowhere really to store them, and because they're old and used we can't give them to the actual kids ward, and the local charity shops wont take teddies. I thought he was too nice though to go to the incinerators and so he's sat in the workshops for now). A quick few minutes with a Size 22 scalpel and there was the wadding I needed. Lovers of all things cute and cuddly be reassured, a bit of suturing afterwards, and he was back up on the shelf having done his bet for medical science.

There we go, the heart in place, a bit more cable troughing (and the plastic cover for an LMA) holding it in place. That just left the need to make some lungs, and so I turned to more inflatables from Scouts.

Our Scout Group meets in a school, and we end up using beachballs for games. Partly because we have no proper storage to keep games stuff, and also because it's quite hard to damage fittings and fixtures with inflatables. We also get through LOADS of them, because kids being kids, they love to burst them. So we buy in bulk these days. I thought the group could spare these two, not least because I was building this on no budget again.

Time for a summer-vibes thoracotomy.

Ready for the operating theatre!

Speaking of, here we are... Poor sod doesn't know what's coming. We did a bit more set-dressing on the day with the fake blood and things.

Pics of the op taking place were a bit tricky, as I was driving the Sim Pad (providing the live observation figures) from a corner under a ton of machinery.

It was quite funny- the staff are so indoctrinated not to cut into our robots, they had to be reassured by me, my boss, and a senior doctor running the sum, that they could indeed go at him with the tough0cuts and knife.

Fascinating to watch the pointy-end of medical treatment, in every sense.

The op went well, the trainer did its part.

This was the condition it was in afterwards- needs a new sternum (which is fine, I pinched loads of the cable troughing out of the skips), a mended skin, the ribs mending, and one of the beachballs didn't survive the scalpel, but otherwise, an hour or so in the workshop and good to go again. 

The next one (at least, the next one I can post on here) should be a C-Section trainer. 

 

Garden Railway Saturday; P.S Models 'Slate Waste Wagon'

Just a short piece for this Garden Railway Saturday; one for Amy too, though I did the painting. We wanted a simple little wagon for her Estate Shunter to trundle about with (not least because it isn't very powerful as a loco), and this very much fit the bill.

It was a lunchtime kit; that is, something which can easily be put together in stages whilst on lunchbreak at the job. MDF construction, excellently machined out as usual from Phil Sharples Models.

Painting started with a spray coat of grey...

...then lots of weathering, streaking with colour washes, and dry-brushing browns and greys.

And here in the mag. The diesel shunter should be getting a feature relatively soon too.

 

BRM Seaside Shop (part three); Inflatable Unicorns, and a Bag of Chips

A little extra post on the detailing of this set.

I needed a small-ish building to fill the space on the left of the scene, and turned to another Dapol kit from the stash, the Shops and Flat.

This went together even easier than the General Store.

I'm less struck on the design of this kit however, I think it's those odd vent-like windows.

I lost the frontage for the kit, so made my own from plasticard (and of course, found the missing one once this was built and painted). The name might seem a bit odd, but it was the best chippy in the area when I was growing up, on the edge of the Russels Hall Estate in Dudley (and the second appearance in a BRM project, there having been a Blue Submarine chippy on the Metcalfe Cinema build).

A big thing with the project was wanting to contrast the brick-built shop with the loads of colourful kitsch tat outside, the classic seaside shop.

Making it in 4mm scale was going to prove a bit tricky, but I had a spares box full of things like these model aircraft kit wheels, and some damaged 00 scale animals (the bigger ones are Playmobil items).

Fiddly painting, to do a 4ft beachball,out of a plastic toy cannonball.

Inflatable animal floats.

The bike was one of the fiddliest things to paint- think it might be a Peco moulding, it came in a box of odds and ends.

The sort of effect I wanted though, the baskets full of stuff, and the inflatables hanging from the canopy.

They work well with the figures that came off eBay, which needed a little bit of a repaint (partly for modesty purposes as they were a bit scantily clad for a British beach).

BRM Seaside Shop (part two); Setting the Scene

Of course, I could have just photographed the shop on its own, for the article, but I really wanted to do a seaside scene to put it in context.

The inspiration was this bit of Barmouth, on the harbourside, though with the details compressed quite a bit.

This was the first of the projects to break the 'everything on an A4 board, in a Really Useful Box' intention, just because I realised the scene I wanted to do would be a bit of a squish otherwise. Still, I had a load of scraps of wood in stock, and a bigger box spare.

The bridge came courtesy of the wonderful, if financially dangerous, second-hand boxes at Frizinghall Model Railways, and is an old Triang elevated track set. I added some I-beams, and corrugated card underneath.

I wanted a small, but contained, bit of beach on the scene. Dapol steps, and Peco platform edges. The cliff at the back is crumpled paper over some foam.

More foam for the beach.

A lot of filler, and real sand; the water was some ripple-effect plasticard. Everything else was details from the scrap-box.

This was the sort of view I wanted for the header picture, and I was pleased with how it came out; it certainly wouldn't have fit on the original A4 board, but makes for a nice photo diorama for future projects.

There's just room for a single-unit railcar (Lima body on a Hornby chassis), which gives it a bit of a St.Ives atmosphere.