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

I’ve spoken to a client and the client said that her dad has had open heart surgery for bypass graft 7 days ago and is now in intensive care and is not waking up after the surgery. Now, what often happens in those situations is the following and the client didn’t know why it was happening and she couldn’t get a straight answer from the doctors.

Now, what often happens is that complications have come up after the surgery for example, bleeding might have occurred or a low or a high blood pressure which means these situations often don’t allow for patients to get woken up out of the induced coma because they’re too unstable.

But I also recommended to the client that we need to talk to the doctors and nurses and find out what’s exactly happening or I can set the client up which is what I have done with the right questions to ask. Again, remember your biggest challenge is that you don’t know what you don’t know and if you don’t know what to look for and if you don’t know the questions to ask, you’re pretty much standing on lost ground because the doctors just don’t seem to have the time to explain to you what’s happening unless you’re asking the right questions, you won’t get through to the right answers.

So that’s my tip for today. If your loved one is in intensive care after cardiac surgery and is not waking up, there are a number of reasons including bleeding, hemodynamic instability that often contribute to not waking up because most of the time, a patient after cardiac surgery should have left intensive care after 24 to 48 hours.

That’s my tip for today and I’ll talk to you in a few days. This is Patrik Hutzel from intensivecarehotline.com.