Double Flee A

This is, according to the new blogger interface, my 1,652nd post. Good job, me. In the time I've had this thing going, a lot's happened. Fortunately, it's all conveniently self-archiving, so I won't even bother going through it. Maybe if you pay me. Yeah, then I would.

I've been working at the pumps all day, making scores of TPN bags. TPN stands for total parenteral nutrition. Enteral means the passage from your mouth to your butt, and some patients are too sick to move nutrition through their bodies that way, so I make it PARenteral, which in this case means intravenous. We have two pumps, both made by Baxter, the Automix, and the Micromix. The micromix's scale isn't working right, so we have to add all volumes less than 1 ml by hand. And there are a lot of those. We make TPNs for babies at another hospital and they get a lot of additions. These are some of the best-nourished people in the world, these babies. We have to make it in a big bag to get the proportions right, but some of the babies are premature, so the actual volume they get is very small. One I looked at, the kid was getting just over an ounce of the stuff in a day's time. Funny to think a huge team of people spends all that time and does all the calculations, goes to all the trouble and keeps everything sterile, so that one kid can get less than an ounce of it.

posted by dale @ 7:22 PM