“Necessity is the mother of invention”

                                   -Unknown

I’ve managed several cases of injury due to bicycle handlebars over the years. Typically, a smaller child crashes his or her bike, and the handlebar hits them in the epigastrium. Children have thinner abdominal walls and less developed muscular to protect them, so this very focal impact can do a lot of damage. 

There is now a clever and inexpensive solution available that can decrease the number of injuries we see from this common mechanism. It’s called the Handlebar Helmet, and was developed by the parents of a 4 year old boy who suffered this injury. It is essentially a special plastic cap that fits on the end of the handlebars. It’s designed to diffuse the pressure of any impact with the handlebar. This product actually does double duty, protecting during a crash, and also preventing injury if a child trips and falls on a bike that is lying down.

The product is very easy to install, and comes in multiple colors so it can be “cool” (very important to kids). This is a nice, simple idea that can prevent potentially devastating injuries.

Over the next two days, I’m going to rerun an interesting pediatric case of handlebar injury.

Reference: The Handlebar Helmet. www.handlebarhelmet.com

Note: I have no financial interest in this product.

It’s the situation that physicians in smaller hospitals dread. A major trauma patient gets dropped off at the door. You do your evaluation, quickly determining that they need services that you don’t just have (head injury and positive FAST in the abdomen, let’s say). You call your community EMS service to transport to a Level I trauma center, which is about 30 minutes away by ground. And just as they are rolling out the door to the rig, the blood pressure drops to 60! What to do?!

The ATLS course is very clear, and very correct. Back into the ED for a quick re-evaluation. The most common cause for a significant disturbance in vitals or exam lies within the primary survey. You will almost always find a problem with Airway, Breathing, or Circulation. (A Disability problem can cause a problem on rare occasion (hypotension from impending herniation), but there’s not much that you can do about it, really. Hyperventilate, hyperosmolar therapy, okay but probably a poor outcome for the patient anyway.)

So you didn’t find any airway or breathing issue. But the abdominal stripe(s) you saw on FAST are larger, so it’s circulation. Now what? And does it matter if you have a surgeon available on call? The answer is simpler than you think.

ATLS says that, if you have surgical support available you have to use it in this type of situation. If you don’t have it, package the patient with a lot of blood and plasma and send. If you have a physician or nurse to spare you could consider sending them along to help during transport, but for small community hospitals this is not practical.

But if you do have a surgeon, does it make sense to use them? Not always! You must take into account response times and transport times. Let’s say it’s 2:00 am and you call your surgeon for this hypotensive patient. They may take up to 30 minutes to get in and see the patient. They then agree that the patient needs a laparotomy and she proceeds to call in the OR team. Yet another 30 minutes tick by.  Will the patient still even be alive when they roll into the OR?

Or you could just put the patient back in the ambulance (air preferably, but ground if you have to) and get them to your trauma center quickly. They can then be whisked directly into a waiting OR in less than 30 minutes from your door. This is probably the ideal solution here. Obviously this doesn’t work as well if you are a few hours away from your resource trauma center. 

Bottom line: Deciding what to do with a patient that needs urgent treatment that you can’t immediately deliver is tough! That’s why it’s always a calculus problem when you’re faced with this situation. But take all of the response and transport times into account, and do what’s best for your patient! 

Here’s a post from my archive describing a different way to remove the foreign body. This is the technique I used, instead of the standard neck incision. The final incision was just a slight extension of the puncture wound, measuring only 1cm. I was able to grasp the head and pull it out without difficulty. The surprising thing to me was the amount of force I needed to apply to actually pull it out! No bleeding, no problems. The patient was observed for 24 hours and discharged home. He had no complications.

A Cool Way To Remove Embedded Foreign Bodies

Many of us have had the experience of digging into bloody tissue for long periods of time trying to locate the object, even with fluoroscopy. Well, there’s a better way of doing this.

A group in China described a technique using a fancy form of needle localization. They employed a set of instruments normally used for lumbar diskectomy (see photo). This set includes a long 18 Ga needle with a removable hub, several dilators and an outer cannula with a 5.8mm diameter. A pair of 3.8mm grasping forceps is also used.

The foreign body is located using a C-arm fluoroscopy unit and the best approach is planned. The 18 Ga needle is then inserted using fluoro until it touches the object. The hub is removed and dilators are inserted over the needle, one after the other. The outer cannula is then placed over them, and the needle and dilators are then removed. The cannula is manipulated until the foreign body (or a part of it) is located within the cannula. It is then grasped and removed, along with the cannula if needed. If the object is too large to enter the cannula, the cannula is pulled back slightly and the grasper introduced past the end of it to grip and remove the foreign body.

The writers shared the details of 76 patients who had a total of 251 foreign bodies removed over a 6 year period. The depth varied from 2.5 to 8.5cm. Procedure time ranged from 8 to 15 minutes, and fluoro exposure varied from 1 to 4 minutes. Success rate was 100% (all foreign bodies were removed) and there were no complications.

Bottom line: This is a very slick technique that promises to dramatically increase the success rate and decrease complications from removing foreign bodies. The amount of time spent is much less than the brute force technique, as is the amount of soft tissue trauma. Large objects that cannot be grasped with these forceps cannot be removed with this method. Although I am a little concerned that the authors’ results were so perfect, it’s certainly worth a try!

Related posts:

• Nail in the neck: What would you do?
• Nail in the neck: Imaging
• Nail in the neck: The operation

Reference: Percutaneous extraction of deeply-embedded radiopaque foreign bodies using a less-invasive technique under image guidance. J Trauma 72(1):302-305, 2012.