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YOUR INTENSIVE CARE HOTLINE - Quick Tip for Families in Intensive Care: What are My Mom’s Chances of Survival After Double Heart Attack, Failed Extubation & Kidney Failure?

/ Patrik Hutzel - Critical Care Nurse Consultant / No Comments

Quick Tip for Families in Intensive Care: What are My Mom’s Chances of Survival After Double Heart Attack, Failed Extubation & Kidney Failure?

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

So, here’s an email from a reader who says, “My 59-year-old mom is in ICU. She’s got insulin- dependent diabetes Type 1. She just had a double heart attack. She got intubated and thankfully, came out of ventilation and an induced coma within a couple of days, and she was responding fine. They’ve done a CT (Computerized tomography) and MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scan of the brain, there was no damage there. And then within less than 24 hours, even though she had physical therapy and got mobilized, she was back intubated. And she had a respiratory arrest, got back reintubated, and then her kidneys were failing.” And our reader is asking, “What are her chances for survival?”

Now, first off, you need to understand that approximately 90% of intensive care patients survive their stay in intensive care. So, the odds are in your mom’s favor, especially at such a young age of 59. You should not forget that your mom is very young at 59. There’s a lot of elderly patients in ICU, so that’s the good news.

Now, is someone with a double heart attack and intubation twice within sort of 48 to 72 hours, kidney failure, and diabetes at risk of not surviving intensive care? Yeah, for sure. One could argue that she’s now in double organ failure, triple organ failure even when she’s intubated, i.e., the lungs are failing, (B) she had a heart attack, so the heart is failing to a degree. And number three, the kidneys are failing. So, one could argue that she’s in multi-organ failure, and that is certainly a risk that she may not survive. But then again, go back to that 90% of intensive care patients survive.

So, it really comes down in the next few days. Can her heart recover? Can her kidneys recover? Can they take the same steps than they did initially? Can they wean her off the ventilator? Extubate her and this time, keep her off the ventilator? It depends that with the heart attack in particular. Is she on inotropes? Is she on vasopressors such as dobutamine, milrinone, noradrenaline, adrenaline, norepinephrine, epinephrine, adrenaline, vasopressin? So, you got to find out how are they supporting those failing organs.

Again, the biggest challenge for families in intensive care in a situation like this 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. That’s exactly where we can help you with here at Intensive Care Hotline.

Also, when someone is in a situation like your mom, we would need to look at all the medications she’s on. What are the blood results? What are ventilation parameters? Again, are they supporting her heart? What is her ejection fraction? Numerous questions for a complex situation like this.

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 send us an email to [email protected].

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, and we answer all questions intensive care related.

Also, if you need a medical record review, please contact us as well. We review medical records for your family member while they are in ICU and we also review medical records after ICU, especially if you’re suspecting medical negligence. But it’s best to review medical records while your loved one is in ICU, because then we can probably prevent any medical negligence because we can give you insights in real time.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for regular updates for families in intensive care, share the video with your friends and families, click the like button, click the notification bell, and comment below for your questions and insights, and let me know what you want to see next.

Thanks for watching.

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

 

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