Red Shirts Here

I'm happy to know that if a spacecraft ever causes me injury it will be appropriated classified:

So we’ve got this patient here who was injured in this spaceship accident. You know, just a routine, uh, orbital mishap. But how do we account for that? Oh, right, it’s ICD-9 code E845 — “Accident involving spacecraft.”

Apropos of nothing in particular, this billing code popped up on a couple of medical blogs last week (KevinMD and Dr. Secretwave101). Intrigued, we did a little reporting.

This extended definition notes that the code includes “launching pad accident,” but excludes “effects of weightlessness in spacecraft,” which has its own code (E928.0).