Have you ever been on a ventilator?

The folks I know that were on a vent were all kept heavily sedated for the entire time…like enough sedation to put them in a coma.

Yes. After a car accident. I don't really remember much about it though, it was 20 years ago this October.

Yes. I was on one for a week, fully conscious after liver transplant surgery due to a frick up by the operating team involving one of my lungs. It sucked, but I could do it again. Thank God I was able to convince them I wouldn't pull shite out and was unrestrained the entire time. I was fully aware when it came out too. That wasn't too much fun, but it wasn't terrible.

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They were death knell during COVID. Most who went on one didn’t come off

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Truth…of course, they probably wouldn’t have survived without being on the vent either. Those were damn hard times that make me sad to think about.

I was on a vent in April of 2021 when I had Covid. It was very uncomfortable. The worst part was waking up with my wrists strapped to the bed, being told by a nurse that I was on a ventilator and thinking I was going to die because all I heard at the time was Covid + Ventilator = Death. I was awake and alert when they took it out and it was torture, but I was relieved that I was coming off of it at the same time.

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second time was seven days later when I had to have my second, this time emergency, heart surgery

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Damn…I did not realize this….

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She said part of the problem was the number of MDs that didn’t have experience with them,

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What?

There's pulmonologist and intensivist whose practice focuses on ventilated pts, these are the guys who were there during covid.... Where I work, those are the only ones with ventilating privileges, along with the CT surgeons.

She must've been talking about some first year residents,...

I was after a car accident i was in. I was in a coma for the first month, so I don't recall the ventilator. I work up during the 2nd month, I had had surgery to fix my shattered pelvis, let all my broken ribs heal, and my neck which was fractured heal. I woke up and I was in a neck brace, and didn't know what happened. I realized pretty quickly I was in the hospital, but I couldn't speak due to the tubes my throat. They had to tie my hands down at night because I was so uncomfortable I would try and take the tubes out in my sleep.

The worst was when the nurse came in at night to tie me down. I know she was coming and I hated that...

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Damn…I did not realize this….

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Yeah. My first heart surgery was to install an artificial mitral valve. Which once you get an artificial valve you have to go on the blood thinner Coumadin to prevent blood clots from forming on the valve, which would be fatal. But Coumadin is pretty fickle and they have to figure out the dosage to give you. Apparently they had my dosage way too high. By day seven my INR number was like 9, which is basically water thin. So, seeing how I was only 7 days post open-heart surgery, every time my heart beat, it was pumping blood out into my chest cavity. Basically, I bled out internally and flat lined around 5-6 PM on Nov. 21, 2016. They rushed me back to the OR, cracked my chest open again, this time not really as careful as the the first time because they broke all my ribs, drained out what blood they could, put the drain tubes back in my chest, gave me blood transfusions (thank you blood doners!) and got me back going again.

I don’t remember most of it. From my perspective I remember it being early evening and I was struggling to breath and felt incredibly weak. The reason it was hard to breath is all the blood that had leaked into my chest cavity was preventing my lungs from expanding and the weakness was because by then I’d lost most of my blood supply. My wife said I was completely “grey.” The nurses were in my room (CICU at Grandview in Bham) and they wanted to get me out of my recliner and back in the bed. I was arguing with them because the bed didn’t sit up high enough and leaning back made it harder to breathe. The next thing I knew it was like 1 AM, I was in the bed and had a giant tube down my throat.

What my wife had to see though was them getting me in the bed and things spiraling down from there. From what she’s told me it was about this time my IVs started to fail because my veins were collapsing. I had lines in my neck and at least one, maybe both arms (I can’t remember). She said they had me sitting up in the bed trying to get the line in my neck going again when I flat lined and fell back in the bed. They pushed her out in the hall and started working on me. A moment later they rushed me and my bed out toward the OR, my heart surgeon stopped long enough to tell her “we’re not sure what’s happened, but it appears catastrophic” he then took off after me. A nurse came and got her and directed her to a small waiting room. Shortly after that a priest came in to talk to her and advised her to call family members to get there as soon as possible. She was there all alone and had started the day expecting to take me home because up until now my recovery had been phenomenal. They had planned to release me this day. She said my surgeon came back sometime later (she think about an hour or two because most of our family was there by then) and said they’d got my heart going again and I was stable. They brought me back to my CICU room shortly after and I woke up some time later.

It messed her up seeing all that. She still treats me like the boy in the bubble a decade later. It also deeply affected our son. He was just days from turning 15. That night he was staying with a friend. When my wife called his friends parents to tell them to bring our son to the hospital as fast as possible, he freaked out. Thankfully our daughter, who was was only 8 and staying either my MIL, didn’t realize what was going on.