Pro Tips for MedBay

[Venku22]

Scan Reports
Shift+Click your patients. If they have a recent scan report, check it and go. Smart medics and MEDEVAC pilots will scan their patients as they bring them into your MedBay. It will save you time if you don't have to re-scan all of your patients.

Triage Tags
Triage tags will tell you a lot about your patients. Red is patients that need care urgently, while orange patients can wait a few minutes. Orange patients will usually have non-life threatening injuries, such as fractures, or even missing limbs. Red patients will have life threatening injuries, such as internal bleeding, serious brain damage, unknown body present in the chest cavity, or any kind of serious organ damage. Black triage tags are usually used to denote dead patients, but since your HUD will tell you when a patient is dead, it makes more sense to use black to denote the worst patients, such as those with a xeno inside them, or with a ruptured lung. Take the time to triage, it will help you in the long run.

Stasis Bags
If you see a stasis bag show up in your triage center, assume its a red patient. No sane medic will put an orange patient in a stasis bag. They are probably the most serious of your red patients, and therefore should probably be treated first. They probably have major organ damage, or need larva removal.

Defibrillator
Keep one on you. When your patient goes into defib, it is not the time to go running around trying to find a defibrillator. There are several on the table outside of Medical Storage, or you can vend one from the WeylandMed Plus inside Medical Storage. Keep one on you, and keep it charged. There are chargers on the table near the MarineMed vendors. Check the drugs immediately after a successful defibrillation. Administer inaprovaline if there is none in the patient already. This will prevent them from re-entering defib. Follow up with any other life-saving interventions, such as active bleeding, peridaxon, quickclot, or dexalin.

Drugs
After the initial medic chem rush, take the time to make some Imidazoline-Alkysine mix. I usually run 10 units Imidazoline and 5 units Alkysine. These drugs work faster than brain and eye surgery. Make sure you pick up either a lifesaver bag or medical storage rig. The standard medic drugs are useful in the MedBay as well. It may seem like a stupid pro-tip, but it's still an important one.

Anesthetic
While normally the Operating Table's built in anesthetic is good enough, any patient with a ruptured lung will be unaffected by the anesthetic tanks. Anesthetic autoinjectors, which are available in the WeylandMed Plus vendor, can be used to temporarily sedate a patient, although they are metabolized quickly, and quite frankly, are garbage. The same goes with oxycodone, choral hydrate, and soporific. They are either unreliable, metabolize too quickly, or increase the surgery failure rate. Save these for field surgery. Take the time to create anesthetic in a beaker with the chem lab. The anesthetic autoinjectors are 1 part choral hydrate, 9 parts soporific. If you follow this mixture in a large beaker, it will be plenty to get you through a lung surgery, just remember to switch back to the Operating table tank when the lungs are done so you are not wasting the mixture. This beaker can be inserted into the spare IV drip in the Medical Locker Room, and can be used in the same fashion as a blood bag. This will ensure your patient stays asleep until the lung surgery is over and you can go back to using the tank in the Operating Table. As a side note, it is easy to tell which IV drip is the anesthetic, as the anesthetic IV will be pink instead of red. Be careful with this mixture. If you leave it on too long, it can cause OD with the Choral Hydrate.

Roller Bed
There are plenty of roller beds available on the Almayer. Keep one on you, either in your satchel or a medical storage rig. A roller bed is much faster than dragging on the floor, and if the medic forgot to splint, it won't damage the patient further as you move them.

Cryo Cell
The cryo cell is an underused piece of equipment. With the default mixture of Cryoxadone that starts on the table, any patient you put in the cell with be healed of brute, burn, toxin, or oxygen damage over time. Be aware, the cryo cells can be loaded with other mixtures, so make sure you know what is in your beakers so you don't overdose your patient in the cryo cell. This does not replace the need for surgery, but it can prolong the time a patient can wait until a surgeon is available.

Overdose
If a patient comes in with an overdose, the easiest way to fix it is to inject a 5 units of water, and then inject 5 units of potassium. This will purge all chemicals in their system. Administer any drugs that are needed, such as inaprovaline, peridaxon, or dexalin. Your other options are the sleeper, which takes time, which you usually don't have, or the smoke purge. I don't like the smoke purge because there is a chance you will inhale the chemicals you just purged from your patient. You can fit a syringe, a bottle of water, and a bottle of potassium in a syringe case, which can be found in the Medical Storage room.

Autodoc
Keep the autodoc busy. Trust me, the marines will let you know when its not being used, and rightfully so. Its basically a free surgery table. Run it in manual mode. Automatic mode takes way too long. Make sure you check the scan reports so you don't miss anything. Nothing sucks worse as a marine than getting out of the autodoc just to have to go into surgery to fix the the autodoc missed..

Symptoms
Throwing up? High toxin, suspect organ damage. If the chest is splinted, its probably the liver. Otherwise, its in the groin.
Gasping for air? Probably a ruptured lung. Could be heart damage. Either way, gasping for air is a red patient. Open up the chest.
Patient on dexalin and peridaxon? Heart or lung damage. Open up the chest.
Patient on dylovene and peridaxon? Liver, kidney, pancreas, or appendix. If chest is damaged or splinted, its probably the liver.
Patient on just peridaxon? Could be brain damage, or the dylovene or dexalin has metabolized already. Check if they are accumulating Toxin or Oxygen damage. Administer the appropriate drug.
Patient is shaking? Chest surgery now. Preferably under armed guard, or at least keep that scalpel handy. That marine is about to pop. (Of course, only if marines know about chest bursting. Otherwise, have fun with the ensuing chaos as you "learn" about the xeno life cycle.)

Last but not least, drag and drop. It took awhile for me to learn this, although I'm sure it's probably in the wiki somewhere. Drag the surgery tray sprite onto your sprite. This will open the tray and allow you to use the tools off the tray without needing to hold the tray. This will prevent you from accidentally walking off with a surgical tray, and it allows you to work with both hands, or hold a weapon during a red alert, or hold a defibrillator for a touch-and-go patient who just won't stay alive. It also makes it possible for more than one doctor to use the tray at a time.

[tobinerd]

Interesting suggestion on having IV drips with a chloral hydrate dilution in them. Gotta try that at some point instead of my syringe setup

[Venku22]

You gotta be careful with the Choral drip. Easy to OD someone. I've been playing around with mixtures in a 60u beaker. Peri, bica, choral, soporific, and dex or dex+. Lung surgery mixture. Only OD concern is peri, which causes brute, but theres already bica in the mix.

My current test mix is 5 choral hydrate, 25 soporific, 10 peri, 10 bica, 10 dex. Even if a medic has recently drugged your patient, these levels are low enough that they wont OD, with the exception of the peri.

[Garrison]

One thing I've been pondering about the Autodoc. How fast is it compared to working by hand? Is it most efficient when doing trivial tasks such as a single fracture? or when someone is completely FUBAR'd? (Multiple breaks, IB, and organ damage)

[DefinitelyAlone0309]

One thing I've been pondering about the Autodoc. How fast is it compared to working by hand? Is it most efficient when doing trivial tasks such as a single fracture? or when someone is completely FUBAR'd? (Multiple breaks, IB, and organ damage)

If we're talking multiple surgeries compounded in one area, like chest (IB, shrapnel, organ, infection, broken bone); doing surgery by hand is faster. If it's multiple broken bones/IBs (hand/feet/chest/groin/head), autodoc is faster.

If it's both, just take care of the larva and autodoc the dude.

[Grubstank]

One thing I've been pondering about the Autodoc. How fast is it compared to working by hand? Is it most efficient when doing trivial tasks such as a single fracture? or when someone is completely FUBAR'd? (Multiple breaks, IB, and organ damage)

My personal philosophy is to always, ALWAYS reserve the autodoc for minor, dispersed injuries. I usually play doctor in the triage role; standing by the advanced scanner, making sure everybody gets a scan, and making sure that the autodoc is full at all times. I always put the people with three or less injuries in a line by the autodoc, and dump the rest outside the OTs.

Inaprovaline and stasis bags do such a good job of stabilizing people, that it isn't' even worth trying to take advantage of the autodoc's auto-stabilizing ability. The very last thing that you want to do in a busy medbay is to tie up the autodoc for 10 minutes with somebody FUBAR'd . (the exception to this rule being if the medbay is severely understaffed and can't afford to have a triage doctor)

As a general rule, any doctor in the medbay (and especially the one on the autodoc) should be prioritizing the lightly wounded. Actual surgeons would want to prioritize crabs first, because they're the only marines who can't be 'stabilized' by a dose of inaprov. The medbay's job is to maximize the throughput of marines; to minimize the total number of minutes spent by marines in medbay, and to get them back to the field ASAP. If you can get through three people with a couple broken bones, or one FUBAR'd person, the choice is obvious. Getting the three marines back on the field benefits the team much, much more than the one FUBAR'd marine.


tl;dr: always prioritize the lightly wounded, especially on the autodoc. It stops the formation of medbay hell and helps ensure a marine victory.

[Venku22]

I'm of the same opinion as DefinitelyAlone0309. If the injuries are spread out all over the body, autodoc. If all the injuries are in one area, then you can do them all at the same time by hand. If all the patient has is multiple fractures, autodoc for sure. If its fractures plus other surgeries in the same body part, I do it by hand. A big one is chest injuries. I will usually do chest surgeries by hand if there is IB, shrapnel/larva, and organ damage in addition to fracture. I can do those all in one go.

The exception is ruptured lungs. I will put them in the autodoc if the autodoc is empty. If not, I will stabilize the ruptured lungs, treat any other injures in the chest cavity, and then re-triage the patient. If they have fractures to every other limb on their body and no other life threatening injuries, I send them to the autodoc lineup.

[Grimreaperx15]

I personally avoid using the black triage tag, because it isn't obvious on most uniformed compared to red or orange, and often makes it less likely the tagged person is treated, rather than being immediately treated.

Second, and most importantly, peridaxon allows the lungs to function as if they aren't damaged, and so standard anesthetic works just fine. You don't need any complicated setup, just jam a peridaxon pill down their throat, wait until it's in their blood, and hook them up and operate. It's worth noting it sometimes takes a bit to actually work sometimes, so examine them until they're asleep.

[Sulaboy]

I personally avoid using the black triage tag, because it isn't obvious on most uniformed compared to red or orange, and often makes it less likely the tagged person is treated, rather than being immediately treated.

The black triage card should be reserved for indicating that a body cannot be revived. This way you won't have marines dragging medics bodies that the medic knows cannot be revived.