Hi, it’s Patrik Hutzel from intensivecarehotline.com with another quick tip for families in intensive care.
So in my last quick tip, I talked about a client that was in ICU with ARDS after COVID infection, and the client ended up proned and then was doing very poorly despite being proned, despite being on epoprostenol/Flolan nebulizers, despite being on standard therapy for ARDS, for COVID, which is steroids and remdesivir, an antiviral medication.
So they were doing all the conventional things that they were meant to do for someone with COVID/ ARDS. And with FIO2s going up on the ventilator up to a hundred percent and with PEEP levels going up to 15. So what the intensive care team was missing or suggesting to the family or offering to the family that ECMO is also an option if proning doesn’t work. That never came on the table. So the intensive care team, (a) wasn’t transparent and (b) was potentially misleading the client’s family because they didn’t offer everything that is available to them for treatment.
So lo and behold, we spoke to the intensive care team. After we made the family aware that ECMO should be offered in a situation like this. So we spoke to the intensive care team and the intensive care team only made excuses for why ECMO wasn’t offered. They weren’t really excuses that were believable. And it was simply a matter of probably not having enough resources and not wanting to refer the client to another hospital, which is also an option in a situation like this.
Cutting a long story short, unfortunately, this 52-year old man passed away within less than 24 hours after we spoke to the intensive care team. And these are incredibly unfortunate circumstances. And what’s the lesson here? You need to treat intensive care like it is, life or death. You need to treat it like life or death from day one. If you don’t do your research, you literally can have your loved one die. Like it happened in this situation. This is incredibly tragic, but you can’t be deliberating whether you need to do your research or you don’t because literally if you don’t, it could be a life or death situation like it’s showing us over and over again unfortunately in those situations.
When someone goes into intensive care, you can’t leave things up to chance. You can’t just leave everything in the intensive care team’s hand because intensive care teams will mislead you unless you are asking the right questions unless you’re getting someone on your team that understands intensive care inside out. And that’s what we do here at intensive care hotline. We understand intensive care inside out. We can ask the right questions. We can set you up with the right strategies so that your loved ones get best care and treatment. Needs to be transparent. You need to be educated on all options available and for your family.
So that is my quick tip for today.
You need to start doing your research and you need to get professional help from day one, especially at the moment with the pandemic, resources are even more scarce than outside of the pandemic. If you don’t get ahead of your research, if you don’t get one step ahead of the intensive care team, which is what is needed, you need to be able to look into the future of what’s happening with your loved one. What are the options available? What happens for someone with ARDS? What happens for someone with COVID-19? But also with other critical illnesses in intensive care, you need to look ahead. What are the options for you available? And here is one option for you at the intensivecarehotline.com.
If you have a loved one in intensive care, go to intensivecarehotline.com. Call me on one of the numbers on the top of the website, or send me an email to [email protected].
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This is Patrik Hutzel from intensivecarehotline.com and I’ll talk to you in a few days.