Either this nurse has bad luck or there's something fishy going on and he really did kill a bunch of people, but the argument made in court makes no sense. Despite that, it worked, he was found guilty.
The nurse was found guilty of Capital murder resulting from supposedly killing 4 patients by injecting air into their arterial lines after open heart surgery resulting in strokes.
I'm really not sure how that's possible, these were presumably radial arterial lines, I'm not clear how air injected into a radial artery "travels straight to the patient's brain", which was the prosecutor's claim. I can't find that any medical professionals supported this theory, but there were doctors who testified that this isn't really possible based on how blood flow in the body works.
I didn't think it was possible with how the prosecution in the case was suggesting it had likely occurred; attaching a commonly available syringe (10ml for instance) to an radial art line and pushing that 10ml of air.
But when you let your (f-d up) imagination go a bit more it would seem to be possible. Attaching an arterial line to compressed air, either the regular "hospital air" outlet or even an O2 outlet would potentially introduce enough air over a small enough amount of time to cause the air to flow upstream and potentially to the brain.
It seems like this sort of jerry-rigged (which it turns out is more correctly called Jury-rigged) system would be pretty obvious to the next person walking into the room but if he had enough time to disassemble it then maybe not, particularly if the focus was on the crashing patient and not the weird suction tubing set-up on the floor next to the bed.
But yes, considering those scenarios I would agree it is possible.
MunoRN, RN
8,058 Posts
I didn't think it was possible with how the prosecution in the case was suggesting it had likely occurred; attaching a commonly available syringe (10ml for instance) to an radial art line and pushing that 10ml of air.
But when you let your (f-d up) imagination go a bit more it would seem to be possible. Attaching an arterial line to compressed air, either the regular "hospital air" outlet or even an O2 outlet would potentially introduce enough air over a small enough amount of time to cause the air to flow upstream and potentially to the brain.
It seems like this sort of jerry-rigged (which it turns out is more correctly called Jury-rigged) system would be pretty obvious to the next person walking into the room but if he had enough time to disassemble it then maybe not, particularly if the focus was on the crashing patient and not the weird suction tubing set-up on the floor next to the bed.
But yes, considering those scenarios I would agree it is possible.