Have been asked for thoughts on the CICO course I attended last week (well, it was a rhetorical question* but no less valid for that). CICO – can’t intubate, can’t oxygenate – is the millennial version of can’t intubate, can’t ventilate. My surgeon has helpfully pointed out that if you can’t intubate and you can’t ventilate, then maybe anaesthesia isn’t the career for you – but I think most of us can appreciate that we’re referring to that extremely rare occurrence when no one would be able to do it on that particular patient at that time. It was an all day course, with the morning spent working on plastic models, and the afternoon in a wet lab at an undisclosed, secure location, on a live anaesthetised sheep. The location is secure to discourage animal rights activists from causing mayhem, even though many more sheep are dying, and much less humanely, in abattoirs around the country every day. I guess potentially life saving teaching is less valuable than Shepherd’s pie and lamb burgers. Let’s face it, you don’t see a lot of elderly sheep around. Not a big demand for ovine retirement homes, methinks. (Actually the last time I did this course, our sheep escaped en route to the lab and they spent an hour chasing it through the streets of N*****n before they could catch it again. Lucky that didn’t make the papers!).
Practising our life saving techniques on a live animal was hugely different to doing it on a plastic model, and there’s no question in my mind that you would be majorly handicapped in any attempt in a real emergency on a human being if you had never had this sort of teaching before. Having said that, it’s not something any of us approached lightly. When the sheep was euthanized at the end, it was quite upsetting. I had to stop myself from saying “wait wait! Don’t do it! I’ll take it home and look after it!”. Because actually I can just imagine myself with a sheep in my backyard, looking woozy and with a large blood stained bandage round it’s neck. Of course, it wasn’t to be – it was too far gone and would have been unethical. Thank you for your sacrifice Mr Sheep.
(*”What is a rhetorical question?” I ask myself.)