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| Our Girl, smiling and holding her Snoopy. The apparatus that's giving one of her fingers that ET-esque red glow is measuring the oxygen saturation in her blood. | Shelby surrounded by her various paraphenalia. The blue thing to the left is a pump adminstering dopamine (a neurotransmitter they're using to temporarily stimulate her heart and raise her blood pressure); the monitor in the upper right is keeping track of her pulse, blood pressure, respiration, oxygen saturation, and atrial pressures inside her heart. |
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| Closeup of the garish assembly attached to her neck. What is all that stuff? Two things: a Swan-Ganz catheter, which measures pressures inside her heart, and a "central line" directly into her jugular vein, which they use to administer drugs (saving everyone a lot of pain and trouble; they don't have to keep poking her to start a new IV in the difficult-to-find veins in her hands and arms each time the vein that her previous IV was connected to "blows out"). They hope to pull out the Swan-Ganz catheter and replace it with a device that measures pressures non-invasively. | Shelby responding to her dear readers. |
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