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Hi, it’s Patrik Hutzel from intensivecarehotline.com with another quick tip for families in intensive care.

So at the moment, we are working with a client who had a traumatic brain injury after a fall from a scaffold. And that gentleman fell six meters down to the ground, head forward. A massive insult to his brain, massive brain bleed, ended up for emergency brain surgery with a craniectomy, which basically means they removed parts of the skull to deal with the increased brain pressures.

Now that got the brain pressures under control. Now he’s been in intensive care, very unstable for the last two weeks, and he’s not waking up after having been off sedation for a number of days. His Glasgow Coma Scale fluctuates between a 3 and a 5 which means he’s not brain damaged, but he’s by the looks of things, severely brain damaged.

The intensive care team is pushing for a withdrawal of treatment, saying that, this gentleman won’t survive for the next few days. But if you watch any of my videos, I have given countless examples where the predictions of intensive care teams are completely and utterly wrong. And patients do survive, 90% of intensive care patients survive according to the research, but intensive care teams are not telling you that because they want their beds emptied.

Cutting to the chase here, what the intensive care team is now doing, they’re pushing towards end-of-life. They’re pushing towards DNR (Do  Not Resuscitate), and they have not mentioned to the family that a tracheostomy might be the next step because a tracheostomy would give the gentleman time to see what he can do, what he can’t do. There’s plenty of time to talk about end-of-life. There’s no hurry. And it’s not up to intensive care teams to deem what is acceptable for “quality of life”, for a patient. It’s up to the patient, and it’s up to the family, and not to anybody else.

So the quick tip here is, that you need to look early on what are the options, if your loved one is not waking up. Now, this family had no idea that a tracheostomy is even an option. And that’s why I keep saying over and over again, the biggest challenge for families in intensive care is that they don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know what to look for, they don’t know what questions to ask, they don’t know their rights and they don’t know how to manage doctors and nurses in intensive care.

So we are now advocating for this gentleman trying to remove the DNR that the intensive team has imposed on the gentleman without even informing the family. That is probably breaking the law. And we are in the midst of helping the family, our client, to revoke that.

So if you have a loved one in intensive care, go to intensivecarehotline.com, call us on one of the numbers on the top of the website, or send us an email to [email protected].

Like this video, comment below what you want to see next, or what insights you have from this video, subscribe to my YouTube channel for regular updates for families in intensive care and click the notification bell.

This is Patrik Hutzel from intensivecarehotline.com, and I’ll talk to you in a few days.

Take care.