Medical Doctor
PRIORITY: Not defined
 Medical Doctor |
Superiors: Chief Medical Officer
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You are the Medical Doctor. Your job is to ensure the crew stays healthy and alive, healing the wounded and reviving the dead. Needless to say, your work is cut out for you, but don't despair! You can still help people! Mostly.
Doctor, Doctor!
When you are a Medical Doctor, your job is to heal people, save them from the brink of death, and revive the dead. You can diagnose injuries and diseases with the help of a health analyzer or even your PDA.
Much of the information on this page is dedicated to the basics of Medbay and the most prudent tips for beginning doctors. It's highly recommended that you read the Guide to medicine for full details on how health and bodies work in SS13, and the more advanced methods of restoring your patients.
Gearing Up
Unsurprisingly, the first thing you should do upon spawning in as a Medical Doctor is explore Medbay, collect the tools you'll need to do the job, and familiarize yourself with the layout of whatever station you're on. There's a lot of goodies to go through, but once you get the hang of things, it's not too hard to equip yourself.
The first thing to note is the medical techfab, usually located in the storage room. You can use it to produce various useful medical items, provided the miners are keeping the station's supplies up. If the Science department is doing their jobs, you'll also be able to print upgraded versions of many medical items once the appropriate research is done, so be sure to check back frequently.
The health analyzer allows you to diagnose your patients, and you'll find an analyzer in the white medkit you spawn with. Simply hit somebody with it, and you'll get a readout telling you what's wrong with them. Using it in-hand toggles reagent scan mode, which instead tells you what chemicals their bodies contain. You should always have one of these on hand; later on, you might be able to upgrade to an advanced health analyzer, which gives even more information.
Three pieces of clothing to collect are the medical HUD glasses, nitrile gloves and medical belt. The glasses allow you to see health bars above living creatures, instantly cluing you in on who's wounded; if the small icon next to them shows a face, they have a disease. The angrier the face looks, the worse the illness. The gloves drastically speed up the time needed to use patches, syringes and pills, and the belt can hold up to seven medical items for convenience. You can find all of these in a medical doctor's locker, usually in the storage room.
- On most stations, there is a pile of spare belts and Medical HUD glasses in the storage room.
Health kits contain a variety of items and medicine. The white medkits contain general use items, whereas the colored ones correspond to damage types. Green is toxin damage, orange is burn damage, pink is brute damage and blue is suffocation damage. Even if you don't know which chemicals do what, you can rely on the contents of these kits to heal a specific damage type from your patients. As a rule of thumb, don't dump the whole kit into one person: at most, one syringe, patch or pill at a time is a good bet.
Surgical tools are needed for, well, surgery. The basic tools are the drapes, hemostat, cautery, retractor, scalpel, saw and drill. The white medkit you spawn with contains half of them, specifically the ones needed to perform the basic 'tend wounds' surgery. You can find the rest in the operating rooms, or print them from the lathe. With the right research, you can also print advanced tools that combine the functions of two tools into one.
Medipens are single-use items that come preloaded with useful chemicals. In particular, the epinephrine medipen contains epinephrine, which stabilizes patients at critical health, and formaldehyde, which stops organs from rotting if injected into a corpse and generally makes revival a lot easier. Sutures and regenerative meshes can be used on people to quickly heal brute and burn damage, respectively, making them ideal for quickly patching up minor wounds. Medical gauze is used to stop bleeding in patients.
The syringe gun is a tool that can be loaded with a syringe, and used to instantly inject people from a distance with a chemical. In theory, they can be used for doctoring to quickly inject someone with a syringe full of medicine at a distance. In practice, people fill normal syringes with lethal doses of poisonous chemicals and use the syringe guns as self defense or murder weapons. The rapid syringe gun can be researched and printed from the lathe, and holds 6 syringes.
Defibrillators are used to bring people back to life, provided their bodies are in good enough shape. In order to use one, you must equip it in your back slot, dual wield its paddles, and target the chest of the body you're trying to revive. With research, the lathe can print off wall mounts for defibs, and later even compact defibrillators that use your belt slot instead.
The stasis bed is an incredibly powerful piece of machinery. When someone is buckled into it, they enter stasis, which essentially freezes their vitals; they won't lose health or blood, but they also won't process any chemicals in their bodies. Buckling someone to a stasis bed while you work on them is highly recommended, but Medbay typically has a limited supply of them.
File:Crewmonitoring.gifFile:Optable 0.png Operating tables are the designated location for performing surgery, but it's the operating computer that makes the magic happen. As Science researches better operating procedures, you can synchronize the computer to download those procedures' data, and any operating table (or stasis bed!) adjacent to an operating computer is "upgraded" to unlock those procedures for patients buckled to them. Make sure to keep your computers updated, and you'll be able to perform much better surgical procedures.
The cryo tubes can be used to heal various damage types with the power of coldness. Provided the cryo tubes are set up correctly, placing someone into a tube will cause them to gradually heal. This is the main method of healing cellular damage. To set up the tubes, simply insert the nearby beakers of cryoxodone (blue), use a wrench on the oxygen tanks, and make sure the freezer is turned on and set to its minimum temperature. You can put different chemicals in the tubes, but the default cryoxodone will suffice if nobody makes anything better.
IV drips are used to quickly inject blood or chemicals into a patient. To use them, fill a beaker or blood bag with the appropriate chemical, attach it to the drip, and then drag the drip onto a patient. If the drip is empty, you can also toggle it between injecting blood or draining blood.
There are a number of other items and machines in Medbay, but this list encompasses many of the most crucial ones you'll need as a doctor.
The First Patient
So you've gotten yourself geared up, and somebody comes running into Medbay, either wounded or carrying a dead body. What do?
Tend Wounds
If the patient is alive, things are definitely easier. If all they have is minor brute or burn damage, just hand them some sutures and regenerative meshes if you have any left, and slap some gauze on them if they're bleeding. If you run out, or they have toxin or suffocation damage, check Medbay storage for the appropriately colored medkits.
For a more intensive method of curing brute and burn damage, you'll want to use the Tend Wounds surgery:
1) Have your patient lie down, preferably buckled to a stasis bed or operating table, and remove their exosuit and/or uniform to expose the chest. Drag their sprite onto yours to strip them if needed. This isn't always necessary, but speeds up the healing greatly.
2) With
off, target the chest and use surgical drapes on the patient to bring up the surgery menu. Select the Tend Wounds for the damage type they have.
3) Use a scalpel on them to cut them open, then use your hemostat on them to begin fixing them.
4) Once they're healthy (you'll automatically stop the procedure when they're done), use the cautery to close them up.
Tend Wounds can heal an unlimited amount of burn or brute damage provided you have the time to spend on it, and if the bed you're using has an adjacent operating computer, you might be able to use upgraded versions of Tend Wounds for faster healing.
Critical Situation
A patient with over 100 damage in any category will be in crit, typically crawling around and likely unable to speak properly. If any stasis beds are available, immediately try to buckle them in to stop any further degradation; if not, inject them with epinephrine to stabilize them as you work.
Tend Wounds is again the best non-chemical way to heal brute or burn damage, and
clicking on them with
off and an empty hand allows you to perform CPR to alleviate suffocation damage over 100. A patient suffering from many types of damage but still alive is best suited for cryo tube healing.
Limb and Organ Damage
If an organ is listed as "severely damaged" or "nonfunctional" on your health analyzer, the patient will likely suffer from effects ranging to blindness (eyes) to constant toxin damage (liver) to dying (heart). You have two options here: one, if the patient is in a proper bed, you may be able to perform a surgical procedure to fix their organs, such as a Coronary Bypass for the heart. These surgeries can typically only be done once per organ.
Alternatively, you can replace the organ with the Organ Manipulation surgery. The medical autolathe can print off cybernetic organs, with better cybernetics available as Science researches them. You can also take organs out of a healthy body and use those, but beware that organs decay when not in a living person. Note that organs will gradually heal over time, so it's usually safe to ignore "slightly damaged" ones.
Limbs can be reattached in the same fashion, using the Prosthetic Reattachment surgery. You can use cyborg limbs from Robotics, or reattach the original limbs if you can find them. Not having limbs can be incredibly frustrating, but generally isn't life-threatening.
Blood Loss
Blood loss can be a deceptively dangerous ailment, characterized by fainting and taking damage, and is often caused by bleeding patients being dragged along the ground. If someone is leaving a trail of blood behind them, stop dragging them! Aggressively
them, then drag their sprite onto yours to carry them safely.
Once they're in Medbay, you can either feed them iron, inject saline-glucose solution, or find a compatible blood type in a blood bag. You can also combine a sample of their blood with unstable mutagen to duplicate it. IV drips are the best way to quickly inject large amounts of blood into somebody, but don't overfill them!
Diseases
If you're wearing a medical HUD, people with diseases will have a small smiley face next to their health meters. Blue faces are good diseases, green and yellow are negative, and red or flashing red are extremely bad.
Your health analyzer will tell you the name and cure of any disease infecting a patient. The cures are almost always chemicals you can obtain from Chemistry, and once somebody is cured, the Virologist can make a vaccine from their blood.
Other Problems
In addition to the above, there are other semi-common issues people may have. This isn't a comprehensive list of solutions, but the most immediate way to help.
Radiation: Caused by being near the supermatter crystal or singularity, or genetic problems. Feed them pentetic acid or multiver to get rid of their toxin damage, and ask your fellow doctors for help if you don't know how to make pentetic acid (or just look it up on this wiki). Showers pause the harmful effects of radiation, making it easier to heal.
Cellular damage: A rare damage type mostly caused by slimes. Put them in the cryo tubes.
Brain damage: Can randomly happen to anybody, and comes in many forms. Target the head and use the Brain Surgery procedure to try and fix them. Not all forms of brain damage can be fixed by surgery, however.
Augmentation: Not a problem per se, but people might ask you to surgically replace their body parts with cool cybernetics, or stick implants into them. All of this and more is a simple matter of performing the appropriate surgery.
Raising The Dead
If a patient has died, they can still be revived using a defibrillator, but only if they meet the proper requirements.
0) Examine your patient. If their description mentions that "their soul is departed", that they're "catatonic", or they "committed suicide", that character's player has deliberately chosen to leave the round. Throw them in the morgue or harvest their body parts.
1) Buckle them to a stasis bed, or inject formaldehyde (your epinephrine medipen has some). This stops their organs from decaying further.
2) Check their heart with your health analyzer. If it's "non functional", you can't defib them. Fix it with a Coronary Bypass surgery, or replace it altogether.
3) While you're at it, fix or replace any other "severely damaged" or "non functional" organs. If the brain is "non functional" due to heavy drug abuse, you'll have to do brain surgery. Only the brain and heart are truly necessary, but nobody likes being deaf, blind and liver-poisoned.
4) Fix their bodies using Tend Wounds; too much brute and burn damage will prevent the defib from working. Remember that corpses don't process chemicals, so you'll need to manually repair them. Make sure to remove your patient's exosuit and uniform to speed things up. If there's any negative chemicals in them (use your analyzer's reagent scan mode), use the Stomach Pump surgery to flush their systems.
At this point, you're ready to try defibrillation.
5) Remove your backpack and place the defibrillator on your back. If it's wall mounted, simply click it; if it's a compact defibrillator, put it on your belt instead.
6) With both paddles in one hand and the other empty, use them in-hand to dual-wield the paddles.
7) Target the chest and apply defibrillation to the patient. Make sure they're not wearing anything protective over their chest, and make sure you're not dragging them, or you'll electrocute yourself as well!
If everything went well, the patient will return to life! Immediately drop your paddles and click them with a free hand to apply CPR; freshly defibbed patients typically have large amounts of suffocation damage, and CPR will bring them out of crit (below 100 damage). With any luck, you can then proceed to treat them as you would anybody else: check their blood level, give them appropriate healing chemicals for whatever damage they have, and generally patch them up.
If you successfully revive someone only for them to immediately die again, try to buckle them to a stasis bed and look for what could be causing it. Check their organs, any chemicals in their body, their blood levels, radiation, and if all else fails ask other doctors for help.
In a worst case scenario, there are other means to bring players back into a round. Roboticists can turn brains into cyborgs, and Botanists can turn them into podpeople.
Alas Poor Yorick
If a "patient" is reduced to merely a head, you'll have to get creative. The best way to handle this is to simply put the head or brain on a new, healthy body.
To get said bodies, you can bother Genetics, Botany or Xenobiology for a monkey, inject it with mutadone to turn it into a human, and then begin operating. If you're using the brain, cut it out of the dead guy's head, pour a beaker of mannitol on it to heal it, cut out your healthy body's brain, jam the old brain in, and start working to defibrillate. You can also amputate the new body's head and attach the old one through surgery, but make sure the brain is still good!
Medibots
Medibots can be invaluable helpers for a medical staff. These helpful little bots can be built by Robotics, and automatically perform the Tend Wounds surgery on wounded people who come across them. By opening them up with a free hand, you can set them to patrol the station, remain in one place, and even synchronize them to the research department to upgrade their healing abilities.
Just one medibot can be a massive help for any Medbay staff, and they can even be given funny interesting names. Be wary of emagged medibots, however, as they'll instead pump their "patients" with deadly toxins!
No Respect
You will, inevitably, have invaders. It's not your job to fight people but it's up to you if you want to try to defend your department from random people breaking in to steal things. If you're stressed it may be better to just look the other way and let someone else handle it, or call security. Your best defense is your coworkers - with up to 5 Medical Doctors, the CMO, Virologist, two Chemists and countless patients, Medbay is packed, and all of them feel the same sting of disregard cast at them by fellow crewmates. If you band together, you will usually far outnumber any lone threat that wants to break down every window and grille in your workplace.
Sometimes it may be necessary to shoot someone with some morphine (don't overdose!).
Tips
- The medical belt can store all surgery tools.
- You can cut bedsheets with a scalpel or wirecutter and use the resulting cloth to craft a chemistry bag
. - Bedsheets work as drapes for surgery.
- If you implant a guy with a flashlight, he can still use it as a flashlight.
- Raw carrots heal eye damage.
- You can use a health analyzer on a body to see the time of death.
- Star-Kist is just cola with orange juice. Thus will metabolize a bit faster and can be used as a very poor man's medicine to speed up CPR.
- Cryo won't work on you if you have cold resistance:
- Insulating items like hardsuits, ins. gloves, gasmask, firesuits - they all slow down cryo or even stop it from working entirely.
- If the patient in question has cold resistance, you may want to try go old-school and actually apply some medicine yourself, lazy bum.
- That is, of course, if there's only cryoxadone in the tubes, since those need cold body temperatures to work.
- Wearing earmuffs will heal ear damage.
- Wearing a blindfold will heal eye damage.
- Attach a stethoscope on your neck slot and it'll make you look like you know what you're doing.
- Showers (wrenched to be cold) work just as well as cryo, as long as you have the drugs in your system.
- People with hardsuits/MODsuits on cannot be defibbed.
Tips for Traitoring
- The stethoscope can be used to break into the safe.
- You can replace the cryoxadone in cryo tubes with acid, so instead of healing people cryo will melt them to death.
- The syringe gun is one of the most lethal weapons on the station. A simple 15 unit lexorin syringe will kill unless the victim receives medical care. Anyone with a thick suit will block syringes though.
Hello, I'm Dr. Death
So, you are a traitor? DON'T HIT SUICIDE JUST YET! There is so many wondrous, terrible things you can do. When people are injured, they are taken to medbay to be "doctored" by you and other people. You can then shoot them up with poisons, take them some place private in or near medbay and take what you want, or go for malpractice to end them. This is very good if you happen to be in a crowded area and stab the HoP and drag them back to Medical when people are in a panic.
To Conclude
You are a Doctor. Your job is to help people - sometimes forcibly - and dealing with the fallout from the numerous violent calamities that inevitably descend on the station. You serve both as go-between for the station and large and the more specialized medical departments.
If you seek respect in this job, you have to go out of your way to earn it. But never forget the damage you can inflict on the unwary.