BAD Night, VERY BAD Day

Last night the plan was to try to get Faith to tolerate CPAP as a means of helping her airway obstruction. Let’s just say EPIC FAILURE.  Even with the inclusion of sedation that should have been able to keep a horse calm she was able to breakthrough and rip it off.  The dose was the highest allowed without already being on a respirator, at a slightly lower dose she was trying to get out of bed.

At 9AM we had a very confrontational bedside meeting with ENT and the ICU team. We told them all where this was going and the fact that she needed immediate assistance as she had been working way too hard to breathe since late last night.  Her breathing was obviously very difficult and her heart rate was going very high.  Apparently albeit repeated attempts it fell on deaf ears.

At 12 noon she was again intubated and returned to a ventilator.  The intubation procedure was very smooth; there was no loss of oxygen or cardiac events.

There is so much more to the story that I may go into at a later time, but to summarize we are very disappointed in the level of care she has received from an institution we once revered.

Without any studies to tangibly support it they have clinically diagnosed her problem with the ubiquitous “upper airway obstruction”.  Their solution to remedy the airway problem is tracheostomy.  We are not convinced that such a radical procedure is necessary without knowledge of the underlying cause, nor are we convinced it is appropriate without knowing the root cause of her breathing difficulty.

We have been asked if this is a life-threatening condition, the simple answer is the reason one is in an ICU is because their condition is life threatening.

“What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger”