BinRat55 said:
I just reread MedCorps' post... Lol! Really? Geez ya coulda just said "yeah, it's important..." Now i'm thinking about Keanu Reeves on a bus...
There's a patient with a bad case of the drip, you have only 5 mgs of penicillin. It takes 3 to eradicate your skank-given, crotch-infesting VD and there's not enough for both of you.... what do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO???
Join the Army and become a SUPPLY TECH!!! (We don't need to know how to count...)
Obviously!
As well, we also shouldn't depend on you for medical advice, particularly if it's a mate who asks you what he should do about his drip. As an aside, that has actually happened to me - after I was no longer a Med A, on Inf Phase trg in Gagetown, one of the FNs (foreign national student, not the rifle which we were still using) found himself with a bit of a problem because he had spent some time with one of the "popular" girls he met at the Cosmo. He was worried that if his diagnosis was officially recorded it would, along with all his other records, be sent to his home country, a Muslim state in the Persian Gulf region.
Even then, nigh on 30 years ago, gonorrhea was becoming resistant to penicillin. I don't know what treatment my Arab friend received at the Base Clinic (my only involvement was a quiet word to friends/former colleagues to ensure that the information was stripped from his med records before he returned home) but it is possible that by then (30 years ago) penicillin was not the first choice antibiotic for N. Gonorrhea; now, it is not even considered. If you want to know what treatment guidelines look like for the drip
try here. If MedCorps' example of medical math made your head hurt, prepare for a real headache.
Back in the day (when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the urban legend about the dreaded "black syph" abounded in Cyprus and the Sinai) we still used penicillin to treat N. Gonorrhea infections. Of course, it wasn't no "nancy boy" regimen of oral antibiotics; you got shots, in the backside, with a large bore, blunt needle. And surprise, we medics needed math to figure out not only how much to give you, but also how to prepare it. Though it was probably available back then in an injectable suspension, all we saw in operational areas were vials of penicillin powder that first had to be reconstituted by the addition of a liquid. As dosage of penicillin was in "units", and the recommended therapeutic dosage for uncomplicated gonorrhea was 2.4 million units (for males - double it for females) of procaine Pen G (I looked it up in my very, very obsolete Merck, 12th edition) by I.M. injection, how much "Sterile Isotonic Sodium Chloride Solution for Parenteral Use" do you add to a 5 million unit vial of Pen G in order to get a suspension 500,000 u. per ml (I deliberately made the problem easy). Now, how many injections (and size) do you give the sorry SOB if a single I.M. injection site should not receive more 800,000 to 1,000,000 u. because of potential sensitivity. While the numbers may be a bit off that was an actual calculation I had to do more than 35 years ago in Ismailia. The poor sod got three or four shots, mostly due to a very slim build without a lot of muscle mass in the ass to accept the rather thick solution. IIRC, I think he was a Sup Tech. We hospitalized him later that day because of localized reactions, and since he needed the same dosage the following day, put him on an IV. I bet he remembered to wrap before using in the future.
