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

So today’s tip is about seizures and medication management in intensive care. So currently we are working with a client who has their 58-year old father/husband in intensive care after cardiac arrest and hypoxic brain injury and now has a tracheostomy.

The client’s father is off the ventilator and is now at the cusp of going to a hospital floor or a hospital ward. There are some delays because as you might’ve heard me say before, it’s very difficult for a hospital floor or for a hospital ward to look after a tracheostomy, because only intensive care nurses are trained to look after a tracheostomy, and it’s going to be very difficult for the hospital to find the relevant staff to look after this patient to go to the hospital floor or to the regular ward. If you are in a similar situation, go and check out intensivecareathome.com to help your loved one to go home with a tracheostomy on a ventilator that is again, intensivecareathome.com.

Coming back to our client’s situation, the family is locked out of ICU still because of COVID. They can’t visit, the intensive care team can only give them updates over the phone, and they have limited time on zoom with their loved one. In any case, the intensive care team has shared with the family that their loved one has seizures, has had unexpected seizures, that they’re medically managing at the moment with a benzodiazepine, such as lorazepam and they’re also giving a bolus dose of Keppra.

Now here’s the thing, when someone has a hypoxic brain injury, and in this situation, this client has already sustained seizures in the past. The client was on Keppra and phenytoin and then they stopped it. And now they’re starting to have seizures again.

Now, with that in mind, you as a family, you need to ask questions. You need to know, have they stopped anti-seizure medications? Are they still giving it? Why is their loved one all of a sudden now having seizures? Have they done a CT scan? What is the neurologist saying about seizures?

So, 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. And this is clear, that the case in this situation where the family’s not asking the right questions to the intensive care team, and you need to do that from day one. Don’t do it and you will be fighting an uphill battle. You will always be one step behind, and the intensive care team will lead you where they want to go, but you need to leave the intensive care team where you want to go.

So this is my quick tip for today.

If you have a loved one in intensive care, and I know you need help, go and check out intensivecarehotline.com and call me on one of the numbers on the top of the website, or simply send me an email to [email protected].

Like this video, subscribe to my YouTube channel for updates for families in intensive care and click the notification button and comment down below what questions you have or what insights that you have from this video.

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