Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[xqvn]

During a siege, one of my dwarves had his left thumb broken, his left hand smashed open, one of his fingers broken and smashed open, and his foot mangled beyond recognition. According to the health screen, he needs a diagnosis, sutures, bones set, wounds dressed, immobilization, and crutches. There's a chest in the hospital zone with seven splints, four crutches, and ten random threads. There's two traction benches, one a couple tiles away, one directly to the left of the dwarf's bed. I can make more of all of them at will.

I've waited almost half an in-game year, given every dwarf in the fortress all of the medical labors, burrowed dwarves into the hospital zone for weeks, set up a bed room for a medical dwarf near the hospital zone, and nothing has happened to the injured dwarf except for him developing an infection.

The only thing I can think of that I could be missing is casts, but the wiki implies they're not necessary for this. What am I doing wrong?

[slashnul]

He doesnt need, or has had a cleaning?  Thats usually the 2nd step after diagnosis, and everything could wait till thats done.  I had someone hurt on a bed for a long time in the new embark until I dug down to a 2nd cavern and made a drinking zone there.

*edit* well you must have a water source cause he wouldnt live 6 months without a drink.  Ive had people laid up for months with lots of injuries.  One doctor diagnosed him like 15 times in a row, one for each whisker that was injured.  Anyways... I dunno.

[xqvn]

He doesnt need, or has had a cleaning?  Thats usually the 2nd step after diagnosis, and everything could wait till thats done.  I had someone hurt on a bed for a long time in the new embark until I dug down to a 2nd cavern and made a drinking zone there.

*edit* well you must have a water source cause he wouldnt live 6 months without a drink.  Ive had people laid up for months with lots of injuries.  One doctor diagnosed him like 15 times in a row, one for each whisker that was injured.  Anyways... I dunno.

There's a large brook outside of the fort. I haven't seen anyone clean him, but its probably happened since dwarves have brought him food and water.

[Akura]

The brook itself wouldn't be a water source unless you channel through the top layer.

[xqvn]

The brook itself wouldn't be a water source unless you channel through the top layer.

There's also a few ponds? There definitely has to be a water source somewhere, since I've seen dwarves cleaning other wounded, and more than one instance of "Urist cancels clean self, water source contaminated".

[xqvn]

The brook itself wouldn't be a water source unless you channel through the top layer.

Not true - maybe this has been fixed. I have a brook designated as a water source and my dwarves regularly go there to clean, get water for patients, filling ponds etc.

I really need a well.

I loaded up the game for a second to check this - when I loaded in the injured dwarf was thirsty, and I set up a water source zone over part of the brook. A dwarf then walked out, drew water from part of the brook that I hadn't selected, and brought it to the injured dwarf. I waited a bit after that and nobody felt the need to clean him with the water. I'm still not sure that's even part of the problem given that he still has the "diagnosis request" icon and not the "cleaning required" one.

I also did a little more digging in the health screen - he was brought in on 15th Limestone, evaluated twice on the 16 and 18th, and was also cleaned once on the 18th. So apparently two of the big things were done almost immediately, but nothing else has happened afterwards even though it's now 2nd Granite.

Thought of two possibilities during this:
I was mistakenly under the impression that chief medical dwarves were relevant to healing and swapped other dwarves into the role over the months to try and fix the problem, and I don't seem to have soap. Could either of those have halted the process?

[slashnul]

I dont think either of that would matter.  Soap is a bonus to cleaning but not required.  Chief Medical is just an honorary title... anyone with the labor can perform.  Hes still unconscious in bed right?  Might try deconstructing the bed, so someone carrys him to a new bed and kickstarts the diag process again.  otherwise if hes mobile... you might have to hurt him.

[xqvn]

I dont think either of that would matter.  Soap is a bonus to cleaning but not required.  Chief Medical is just an honorary title... anyone with the labor can perform.  Hes still unconscious in bed right?  Might try deconstructing the bed, so someone carrys him to a new bed and kickstarts the diag process again.  otherwise if hes mobile... you might have to hurt him.

He's definitely been awake whenever I checked on him. He's getting more drowsy, though. Deconstructing his bed seems to do nothing except leave him lying on the ground oozing pus. He's not even trying to move.

I also removed and replaced the hospital zone a few times over the months (both to try and fix this dwarf and because I needed my mayor to do things and we didn't have supplies to help at the time anyway), but every other dwarf who's gone into the hospital came out fine shortly after (or in the mayor's case, months later when I bought supplies) so I don't think it's because of that either.

[NullForceOmega]

I'm also pretty sure that he'll need to actually be unconscious for the work to get done, but that info may be out of date.

[slashnul]

Awake but not mobile.  Hmm... it could kill him, in his messed up state... but you can go 1z above him, channel out a hole over his head, and get a dwarf to drop a rock on him.  That might get the docs attention.

[xqvn]

Couple things:
1. water source zones need to be designated on the tile *adjacent* to the actual water (rather than on the water tile itself), for some reason.

I actually just highlighted a huge rectangle that took up as much of the brook as I could since I wasn't sure what specific part of the brook to highlight and didn't want to slowly draw a line through it. Pretty sure the zone still covers areas adjacent to it.

2. Diagnosis and other health jobs can be weirdly low priority. One way to force healthcare is to choose a dwarf and disable all their labours except healthcare (make sure all of the healthcare labours are activated, especially diagnosis in your case). Then they'll have no other jobs competing for their time. Of course, you can also use burrowing, but you have to make sure the burrow includes a water source, buckets, cloth, thread, splints, gypsum powder, crutches, etc. etc.

Tried turning off labors two or three times, didn't work. Burrowing just resulted in the burrowee staring at the injured dwarf until he started suffering from dehydration because I didn't bother to put in food/water.

Even then, your new doctor will probably do the dwarfy thing and decide it's a good time to go to sleep on the hospital bed.

I've somehow never had this happen.

I'm dealing with the aftermath of a particularly skilled and well-equipped vampire human hammer lord visitor, and the healthcare system has been maddeningly slow, even with careful micro-management. I wish those jobs had top priority. Would be nice to be able to do that through the jobs menu.

Agreed, and good luck.

EDIT:

I'm also pretty sure that he'll need to actually be unconscious for the work to get done, but that info may be out of date.

That sounds logical, but I've never heard of that being a thing and have never really paid attention to whether hospitalized dwarves were unconscious or not.

Awake but not mobile.

He specifically can't stand with his foot in its current state, but he did somehow manage to drag himself to the hospital anyway. After crawling along the top of my fortress's wall for a while.

Hmm... it could kill him, in his messed up state... but you can go 1z above him, channel out a hole over his head, and get a dwarf to drop a rock on him.  That might get the docs attention.

I don't actually know how to do that. I get the feeling if they aren't responding to the pus coming out of his foot they wouldn't respond to that, though.

[xqvn]

Pus might be a clue - that's infection, I guess? Maybe you need soap after all? Dunno. Never had infection, to my knowledge.

I'm pretty sure the infection is a fairly recent thing, or at least I don't remember seeing it mentioned until about last month.

[slashnul]

With an infection his health is compromised and always will be.  But if you can get him using a crutch then he can be very useful.  Misc Obj training is valuable.  Anyways... so to drop a rock on him... channel a single tile above him.  From the floor of the next level above, to the ceiling of his current room.  Then next to (or over) that opening make a Dump zone (i-d).  Make sure its the only active dump zone.  Find a rock nearby and set it to Dump.  Someone will come by and drop it down the hole on him.  That will either kill him or get the doctors attention... problem solved either way.

Or... once I had a dwarf whose foot go trampled by an undead horse.  Even though it said he needed a crutch he refused to use it.  He'd limp around slowly, flashing yellow... was painful to watch.  But he was the queens nephew and had lots of friends so I tried to keep him happy.  Took away all labors and crafts except for brewing and let him socialize all the time.

[MobRules]

How many dwarves in your fort have the medical labors assigned?

I assign all the medical labors to all the dwarves, otherwise things take too long to happen.

[Saiko Kila]

What is his medical history? How many positions are there?