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

Today’s tip is about family meetings in intensive care, especially when palliative care is involved, and the agenda of end-of-life is being pushed by the intensive care team or by palliative care.

So this week, I was with a family meeting with a client that had their mother in intensive care after abdominal surgery, after a clot in their leg that is causing some discoloration of the toes, but she’s also got a pneumonia, which keeps her ventilated with the breathing tube and the endotracheal tube.

So the intensive care team and palliative care wants to push towards end-of-life and says that, their mother would not survive this day in intensive care, that their mother will never wake up, even though she’s on low amounts of sedation and if you switch off that sedation, you need to actually find out if the brain is intact. So far, there have been no indications that there has been a neurological event such as a stroke or anything like that.

So in the end, the intensive care team and palliative care, after we ask all of our questions about what are the options besides palliative care and end-of-life care. And again, the intensive care team and palliative care was adamant that the only option is end-of-life, under no circumstances, their mother would survive her stay in intensive care. She’s just simply too sick. Organs are failing. She’s got a colostomy bag, she’s got a clot in her leg, she’s got the pneumonia and there’s just no way she would survive this.

Lo and behold, they never mentioned, that for example, a tracheostomy might be an option to give their mother a chance to wake up and let her make her own choice. I mean, what if someone is in intensive care, doesn’t wake up, is not conscious, and people are making decisions about them. That’s just highly unethical and very immoral as far as I’m concerned.

So in the end, we more or less ask the question about, well, what about a tracheostomy? Let’s do a tracheostomy and then they can stop sedation. They can let her wake up, see whether the brain is working or not, and then let her make the decision what she would want next. Does she want to continue trying to be weaned off the ventilator? Doesn’t she want to be around anymore? Those are questions that actually need to be asked to the individual and decisions about life or death should not be made without the input of the actual patient, especially if they haven’t tried to wake up that patient.

So in the end, the intensive care team completely withheld the information about a tracheostomy, that is something that we needed to bring up. Lo and behold, now the patient is actually waking up. Doesn’t even have the tracheostomy yet, but it’s scheduled in the next couple of days. It’s another sign that you should never give up, no matter how doomy and gloomy the talk of intensive care teams or palliative care teams is, you should always use your own discretion. You should always ask questions. You should ask the right questions.

And that’s what we can help you with here at Intensive Care Hotline. We can provide the advocacy for you. We can ask the right questions because you don’t know what you don’t know. That is the biggest challenge for families in intensive care. They don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know what questions to ask. They don’t know what to look for. More importantly, they don’t know their rights. They don’t know how to manage doctors and nurses in intensive care. And that’s what we specialize on to help you with all of the issues, asking the right questions, digging out the information that they’re not telling you. There are a lot of things they’re not telling you because they simply don’t want you to know.

And if you’re not asking the right questions, your loved ones will be doomed. They’re not getting the right care. They’re not getting the right treatment. And they’re not having any options to survive intensive care.

So that is my quick tip for today.

If you have a loved one in intensive care, go and check out intensivecarehotline.com, call us on one of the numbers on the top of our website or on our Contact Us page.

Like this video, subscribe to my YouTube channel, click the notification bell, comment below what you want to see next, or what questions and insights that you have from this video, and I will talk to you in a few days.

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