Barotrauma – How to Respond to Critical Medical Emergencies

Introduction

The guide below provides a representation of how a medic can respond to medical emergencies aboard the submarines occurring in unexpected critical fashion.

You will find the following features in the guide:

• • Equipment preparation for critical situations
  • Responding efficiently with medical attention

Equipment needed

Typically your inventory management would be separated into  3 main components: maintenance survivability, and medical equipment.

Having the needed items ahead of a critical situation is important ahead of time.This means that between missions in a station, or during your fabricator duties onboard a submarine, you should make effort to accumulate these essential items.

Core equipmen (red): these items ensure you can perform sub maintenance on the sub until your medical presence is required in a specific location.

Non-essential (green): the watering can is essential to have if you would be protecting a garden from floods.

Medical items (purple): these slots can be filled in variation. More about medical items below.

During your playthrough, you will find yourself at different stages of medical item accumulation – either through crafting or salvaging. The quality of the items can determine which people you would be able to save in a critical situation. Below you will find a tiered list of medical items.

Additionally, the linked guide provides bit more detail on the crafting process of these items, which can help you expand on the quality of your items as well in the future.

Do note that these combinations are organized in tiers based on crafting difficulty – T1 item sets are easier to obtain than the T2 sets – and can be different in your playthroughs. The combination of items is aimed at being able to resolve any critical injury (e.g bleeding, blood loss), and uncommon injuries (e.g. psychosis).

Situation predicaments

To begin, lets develop some ground rules taking inspiration from the Asimovs 3 Robot Laws, which can be followed in order:

1. Heal Yourself

   – cant heal if you are dead.

2. Heal Others

   – unless conflicting with Rule 1.

3. Replace others

   – fill in roles of dead crew if ordered, unless conflicting with Rule 1 & 2.

Depending on extent of injury, you will have very little, or moderate time to react in order to save a life. This can range from a few seconds to a minute+. The framework below provides an effective logic to deal with any critical situation effectively.

Lets explore some examples.

This man was attacked with a knife. Similar afflictions can occur when fighting crawlers and others underwater creatures.

This crewmate was exposed to radiation without suit protection. You have some time to acquire missing medicines before radiation sickness reaches peak condition and kills the subject.

Due to low vitality, a good reaction would be needed to stop bleeding and restore HP. Additional damage from external sources will most likely kill the subject (e.g. stray bullet or stray spineling spike)

Due to heavy bleeding and Low O2, the patient will be dead soon if left without medical attention. We must act efficiently to address this.