#i am not a physican so please don't come at me

[bleachbleachbleach]

Holy Hospital Monitor!

Was anyone else besides me utterly surprised when we saw Rukia and Renji in the trauma center and then we got a shot of a very modern looking patient monitor???

It wasn’t the presence of the monitor that surprised me — more of that fact that I never considered shinigami to have biological bodies. In my mind, they are made up of reishi particles that happen to take the approximate form of a human body. Why would their vital monitoring equipment look anything like the ones for humans?? This is still utterly amazing to me. I couldn’t help but see how their bodies might work though.

Taking a closer look:

First of all, the top and bottom monitors on the left side read exactly the same, so LOL? Renji and Rukia are of one heart/mind/soul and apparently also, vital signs. Let’s just assume the bottom monitor is a duplicate of one patient for some reason. We are told that both patients are “stable” but I don’t think "stable" necessarily means “identical” LOL.

At first I thought this monitor belonged to Rukia, because we get this shot while she is talking. However, upon closer examination, it has to be Renji’s because he is the only one on a ventilator. And this monitor set up is measuring end tidal CO2 (EtCO2), which is only possible if there’s something on the face to measuring breathing. Although, I guess it is possible that Soul Society has made some medical/technological advances so that they would have a non-invasive way of measuring breathing. But Rukia is also talking during this scene, which would mess up her breathing anyway, and the monitor remains steady the entire time. So, back to Renji. 

EtCO2: End tidal CO2. At 42 mmHg this falls within normal range. But, this is… not exactly a normal waveform. The breaths are a bit short  with somewhat of an obstructive/bronchospasm pattern. Someone should probably take a look at him to make sure he’s breathing correctly and there’s nothing wrong with the ventilator.

BP: Blood pressure. I’d like to point out this is very close to that 120/80 number that gets cited all the time, which is at the top end of what is considered “normal.” The mean arterial pressure (MAP) is 95, which is also normal and means there’s good perfusion to the organs and extremities! Renji gets a gold star for textbook blood pressure. Considering he had some massive blood loss though, I would be very surprised if he had normal blood pressure… I suppose they could’ve given him a blood transfusion and probably got him on a really impressive fluid regimen and pressers lol. The waveform on the big monitor looks kind of weird too though? The dicrotic notch is pretty flat and the waveforms are pretty spaced out… Maybe they’re measuring from a central line that’s in a distal extremity, like a foot. As for the waveform on the small monitor… I think that’s supposed to be another arterial blood pressure but LOL it looks like it’s coming from a different person. It’s on a different scale, but the pulses look way faster regardless.

SpO2: Oxygen saturation. At 97% this is a normal reading. This measures the amount of oxygen-saturated hemoglobin, so this suggests shinigami have normal blood like humans…? I have no idea what’s going on with the waveform though, because this doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen. The waveforms are facing the wrong way….? 

HR: Heart rate (and ECG/EKG). 72bpm is a normal heart rate for an average adult human. However, given that Renji is 1) unconscious and 2) in very good cardiologic shape, this seems a little high to me. I have no baseline to compare this to though. Maybe shinigami have little rabbit hearts or something and this is a low resting HR. This EKG reading though… OH BOY. People spend many years learning how to properly read EKGs, so I’m not even going to try and diagnose what’s going on here. There’s a whole lot of noise in the R-R interval (the line between the tall peaks), which could be indicative of some kind of fibrillation, except it’s also regularly irregular. Suffice to say, this is not what a normal waveform looks like. Maybe this is proof of shinigami hearts working differently?

Conclusion: Well, all the waveforms are consistent (stable), if a little wonky by human monitoring standards. The numbers (EtCO2, BP, HR, and SpO2) all read normally too! Interesting to consider that maybe no matter what, the metrics needed to sustain life are the same as they are for humans, but the internal workings of the body (the pattern waveforms) are completely different!

#bleach tybw #i am not a physican so please don't come at me #however if you know more about reading patient monitors please chime in with your thought and interpretations! #what do i even tag this with #yet another example of B3 going completely off the rails with information that is neither important nor particularly relevant #shinigamiology #no brain just bleach