Greetings space nerds. Decided to give something back to the community and make a vain attempt of pushing the state of our medbay past the fucking meme it is right now and vomit out this little guide.
It will consist of several posts that build upon the previous steps. The experienced player might find this basic and incomplete at start.
If you are absolutely new to med I strongly recommend that you read the wiki basics for doctoring found here:
https://wiki.beestation13.com/view/Medical_Doctor
https://wiki.beestation13.com/view/Guide_to_medicine
https://wiki.beestation13.com/view/Surgery
https://wiki.beestation13.com/view/Guide_to_Traumas
The last two you should bookmark for reference if you get stuck in surgery without an operating computer or something.
So ok. You are new to medical, maybe new to SS13 and just wanna help out. You sorta kinda read the guides above but still need a primer on what the hell to do.
Here is the base minimum you should do to be fairly helpful, albeit inexperienced:
Medical Doctor:
- Spawn in medbay or get to medbay from the shuttle. Go to the medical storage and grab yourself a medical HUD scanner
. This bad boy will provide you with a constant overlay over fellow spessmans that will indicate their health status:
Example: Two smothbrain geneticists that apparently nearly lost a fight with their lab monkeys. While injured they still have some healthbars left so their total damage does not exceed 100, which put you in critical state.
Living teratoma that is not so living right now. Notice the icon changed from blue cross to one indicating that the person is dead but has died recently - so it has potential to be revived. More on that later.
This person is dead AF, husked, but you too can learn how to save them. But thats assuming this fucker will ever be found and I can tell you that we wont be. Oh well.
Flashing Cross indicates that the person is in critical the faster it flashes the closer they are to being perma-horizontal.
This dude has a touch of space aids in him. Make sure you are wearing gloves and internals when you deal with such patients to minimize risk of spreading.
Now that you have your scanner and you can tell how badly people are fucked, consider yourself having THE BASE MINIMUM TOOLSET to actually help people. Again this section is for absolute begginers so we will save setting up medbay and tools for future posts.
if you have read the wiki you should know the:
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medical sleeper, that can inject people with chems, and has an infinite supply of them -
Lifeform stasis bed - that VASTLY decreases they metabolic rate and body decay rate. It doesnt stop it entirely but nearly freezes the patient state in time. Why does it matter? if anything it gives you time to think and to act. They may be close to death, they may have died recently and this will give yo ua chance of actually reviving them before their heart or other organs decay for good. -
cryotubes - hopefully someone set them up for you by now. If not just put the two blue beakers inside the tubes, wrench in the oxygen canisters and set the freezer to lowest temperature available. other mixes are viable too but it is out scope for now.
Now here is the important bit for you new guys: You have to correctly decide what is the next step for a patient before you do anything. I have seen people put corpses into cryo or sleepers way too many times. It is only a waste of not just your time, but the patient, and rest of your team that might need those tools.
Random example: person can be revived or cloned, he has pale skin and is bleeding which already suggests very low blood levels. Body is naked and unrecognizable - severly mutiliated face.
So general order of operations is like this:
Some dude walks in or gets dragged in, take a glance at them and check their health status:
Some hit points lost and they are standing: should be easy, use your medical scanner to see whats wrong with them:
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Brute damage - Drop into sleeper apply 20u of bicardine. Since they have been dealt brute damage it is possible that they are bleeding. If so stop the bleeding first by applying a medical gauze. Dripping blood is a DAMN GOOD TELL that they are bleeding. Deal with bleeding first as some spessman will just fuck off after you use the sleeper on them.
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Burn damage- Drop into sleeper apply 20u of kelotane, they can fuck off at that point.
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Toxin damage- Toxins can be a bit tricky as they can be gradually released into their body due to serval reasons. Things to check first are: damaged organs or inflammated appendix, harmful toxins in bloodstream (click on your scanner to switch to chemical scaning mode). If you find some nasty chems you may want to ask them what happened and notify sec if needed. Otherwise apply antitoxin (do not overdose) or charcoal if needed. If the sleeper is not upgraded and you dont have meds on hand, you can put them in cryo but it is important that flush the nasty chemicals (if any) before you let them go and cryo doesnt to that. Also check if your scanner does not show that the patient has a virus in them.
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Suffocation damage- if the patient lands in crit it will generate this type of damage. If your patient is standing and is just randomly taking suffocation damage you should investigate. Look for harmful chemicals in the bloodstream, check for damaged organs like heart or lungs. Finally you may wanna check if they are not wearing internals that just ran out and they are stupid enough to keep them on. Lastly a virus may be the issue as well - and frowning face on the scanner indicates a harmful virus (except sleathly viruses)
Whenever you perform a health scan take a good look at other things and info. Abnormal state is usually in red. The scanner can tell you if they are irradiated, suffered brain damage, have traumas, are exhausted or even starving. It is best to deal with all ailments before letting a patient go, if you do not feel confident performing say brain or heart surgery just yet, simply ask someone for help, I will explain other situations later.
Local methcook failing at life
Patient horizontal, likely in critical: Same as above applies, except it is good practice to stab them with epinephrine and if you even suspect they may be bleeding; medical gauze. THEN use your scanner and see what are you dealing with. If the patient is stabilized and you have more bodies rolling in, you can consider just chucking the fucker into cryo and hope it wasnt anything serious, if you have the time follow the steps above to fix the dude up.
Patient horizontal, dead but can be defibbed: Grab the sucker onto a stasis table and drag his sprite onto it - the death timer will be nearly frozen and should give you time to think.
There are several things you need to perform before even THINKING of using the defib. Treat this as a checklist:
- Soul status: if the scanner the soul has departed, or that they commited suicide - remove from table pack into a bodybag and moge over to the morgue whenever you have the time. Remember to steal any gamer loot you find on them (dont).
- Brain status: examine the body and see if the head and brain are still there. If not morgue the body. Technically you could draw blood from it and bring it to botany if you feel like it, there always is a chance.
- Blood status: See people kinda need blood to live. Very often people are DRAGGED across the station bleeding like a pig and you end up with someone at about 20% blood left. You have a single blood bag type of each type (tho you can combine some types - check the table in the guide to medicine on the wiki) so you really have to consider if you want to transfuse your entire departments worth of blood into this dude, or just give up and throw them into cloning - if you decide to make a blood transfusion, please fix the holes first, which brings us to:
- Body status: ideally use synthflesh (if available) to fix the body by either splashing a bottle on them, or by using a patch. Remember since the patient is dead no other chems will be processed in their body as they have no metabolic rate as they are… dead. You can also use the tend wounds surgery to bring them up to zero damage. If the body has leftover toxin damage you will have to be prepared to stabilize them and purge after reviving. The patient cannot have more than 180 total of brute and burn damage. Keep fixing until they have less, ideally fix them fully.
- Organ status: you can attempt the revive if the patients heart is still in a usuable state. If you have wide range or damaged or dead organs you may want to reconsider revival as their life may be just absolute hell. Transplants of organs can be done on a dead body, you can also use surgery to do a coronary bypass to give a SHORT WINDOW where you can try and defib the patient. The operation is once per heart only so if it fails the chance is gone.
If all of the above is true you may grab yourself a defib. Someone will either put it in a mount on a wall so can just click it, click on the paddles and help intent their chest. If not put the defib on your backpack slot THEN click on it and do as above. If you want to make sure they have best chances of sruvival you can inject them with some epineprhine - especially if you will be left with some chemicals to purge or have less than ideal atmos in medbay. Then either perform CPR and let them walk it off or drag them to the sleeper and inject with perfluorodecalin which will fix their suffocation in no time.
Defib failed: what do?
- no brain activity - future attempts may be succesful - give it 10-20 seconds the player needs to return their ghost to their body
if they fail to do it 3 times, fuckem, throw them on the cloner pile. It sucks to find out at the last step that they elected to NOT get revived but such is life in the medbay. - no brian activity - future attempts futile - at somepoint the ghost/player left or spawned as something else, lost cause morgue the asshole
- failed - incorrect body state - redo the checklist - too much damage, or heart detoriated too much are the common issues.
Aight this should be the most BASIC guide for medbay operations - it does not cover surgery if you need that just follow the steps in the wiki guide. Remember the surgery computer should provide you with steps. Now for the:
Paramedic:
Your job is to get the dumbasses that hurt themselves to the medbay. You have to find them, move away from danger, stabilize and either treat on the spot or move to medbay for further processing.
You now start with the crew pinpointer and crew monitor. Use it to figure your who received the bad touch and move to their general location. Sometimes some idiot may space themselves so you may need to do a spacewalk. Never had an AI that refused to open EVA for me as paramedic so you should have no problem with that.
Tools you should consider taking:
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Roller bed. Drag one roller bed onto your sprite. Congrats you have a bed in your pocket now. Use them to move patients quickly and safely. Do not drag people unless you drag them from immidate danger. Use the roller bed, or the fireman carry (grab aggressively then drag sprite onto yourself) More often than not people will be bleeding and dropping a blodless body in medbay as a para is a bruh moment.
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Body bag. If they ded you can move this instead as it is a bit less fiddly. Also stops the bloodloss too as well. It can carry multiple bodies too, the bluespace variant can pack a whole bunch of people and fit into your pocket (please do not pocket alive people this suffocates them)
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Syrginge, charcoal bottle, epinephrine bottle, extra burn and brute patches extra bandages. Later whatever healing chems chemistry felt like doing. If any. This will help you stabilize the patients on the field and in some cases to a point where you can tell them to go to medbay themselves
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Cable restraints. Im serious, some people can prove hostile even though you are trying to help them. Some may have brain traumas that will make em hurt themselves or others. Use only as a last resort, or if you find someone that seems very sus and they happen to be lying on the ground injured, you may want to help sec sometimes if you feel like it.
If you continue doing good consider asking HoP for more access, super easy if you actually save HoP’s ass at some point. Molest chemistry for healing and stabilizing chems. If they ask what you can ask for simple shit like tricord pills, atropine, perfluorodecalin.
And that should be it, you have the tools to perform wound treatment surgery. You should also consider doing ghetto surgery on people with embeded objects so they dont die on the way to medbay (or just keep that bed on hand) You can also consider carrying a few iron sheets so you can make a closet to pack extra bodies or items from the scene. People will appreciate you keeping their shit safe.
Thats enough for the basics. If you can do the above reliably, dont get in other people’s way, correctly prioritize emergencies you should be able to deal with 90% of the situations already. There ways to handle literally almost everything the game can throw at you, as well as make the whole experience quicker and easier. More on that later.
