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

So today, I want to showcase how we can give you a second opinion very, very quickly. So, we are currently working with a client who has their 79-year-old husband in intensive care with congestive heart failure. No other significant premedical history, but her husband hasn’t been well in the last few months. He’s been in and out of hospital and he’s been intubated a few times, always for a couple of days. He had some short-lasting cardiac arrest situations as well when he was in hospital where he could be resuscitated very quickly.

So now, cutting a long story short, he has been in ICU now for the last seven days, intubated again. The ICU team is putting pressure on the wife, who is our client, to end his life saying, “Well, he won’t survive and if he does survive, he won’t have any quality of life.”

Now, little did this lady know, our client, that approximately 90% of intensive care patients survive, which means the odds are in her husband’s favor, but that’s not the narrative the intensive care team wants to present to our client. So, that was the first thing we educated her on.

The next thing we educated her on is let’s get some facts. I asked her why do they want to end his life and why do they think he’s not surviving anyway? Well, and she didn’t really have an answer. So, our client was buying into the narrative of the intensive care team without questioning.

Obviously, she had second thoughts, which is why she reached out to us to get that second opinion. She doesn’t have access to the medical records so what we did is I got on a call with the nurse who was looking after her husband and asked a series of questions that our client hasn’t even considered asking because intensive care is highly specialized knowledge. Unless you know what you’re asking for and what you’re looking for, you’re walking in the dark.

The biggest challenge for families in intensive care is simply 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, after I spoke to the nurse looking after our client’s husband, it turns out yes, he’s on a ventilator and he’s in intensive care and he’s in kidney failure. The intensive care team also told our client that he wouldn’t tolerate dialysis for kidney failure.

I dispute that very heavily now that I have all the facts and the facts are that despite the congestive heart failure, he’s not on any inotropes or vasopressors, i.e., he doesn’t need to support his blood pressure medically, which means his heart, despite the heart failure, is beating normally and sustains a blood pressure that is compatible with life, which therefore possibly enables him to get on dialysis.

Now, if he was on multiple inotropes or vasopressors to maintain a blood pressure that’s compatible with life, it would be very difficult to start him on dialysis. But the reality is with the physiological blood pressure, without any medical support, gives the ability to start dialysis or hemofiltration and hopefully get the renal or the kidney failure under control, which then would enable him to hopefully wean off the ventilator because he’s got copious amounts of secretions coming from the breathing tube, possibly because he’s in some form of pulmonary edema, which is fluids on the lungs, because of the kidney failure.

I could go down the rabbit hole here, but I really wanted to showcase to you what you get and how quickly you can get a second opinion. You can get it in minutes, literally. You just need to either give us access to the medical records or you need to need me to talk to the doctors and nurses directly and we can verify what this lady has been scratching her head over for the last week within a couple of minutes.

So, that is my quick tip for today.

If you have a loved one in intensive care, go to intensivecarehotline.com. Call us on one of the numbers on the top of our website or simply send us an email to [email protected] with your questions.

Also, have a look at our membership for families in intensive care at intensivecaresupport.org. There, you have access to me and my team, 24 hours a day, in a membership area and via email and we answer all questions intensive care related.

I also offer one-to-one consulting and advocacy via over the phone, via Zoom, Skype, WhatsApp, whichever medium works best for you. I talk to doctors and nurses directly in intensive care. I can represent you in family meetings with the doctors. I can ask all the questions that you haven’t even considered asking because it is such highly specialized knowledge.

Again, if you need a second opinion, either over the phone or by us looking at medical records, we can do that in real time. We also review medical records after intensive care if you have unanswered questions, if you need closure, or if you are simply suspecting medical negligence.

Subscribe to my YouTube channel for regular updates for families in intensive care, click the like button, click the notification bell, comment below what you want to see next and what insights you have from this video, and share the video with your friends and families.

Thanks again for watching.

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

Take care for now.

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