respiratory-therapy

EMS & Hurricane Katrina: Hurricane Katrina – Our Experiences:

We also suspect the media will have been inundated with “hero” images of the National Guard, the troops and the police struggling to help the “victims” of the Hurricane. What you will not see, but what we witnessed,were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New

Orleans. The maintenance workers who used a fork lift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers, who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators. Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, “stealing” boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters. Mechanics who helped hot-wire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the City. And the food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded.

The many hours of manual ventilation, that is, breathing for someone with a bag like these, reminds me of my RT days.

In color! (I carried around a set of colored pens and drew this one in a travel scrapbook that is mostly filled with memories of a Europe trip I took with my parents and sister).

At UVa I was one of the Respiratory Therapists on the bronchoscopy team. Basically we assisted on bronchoscopies for patients who needed to have their lungs looked at with fiber-optics. I assisted on some odd ones. I remember one very critically ill patient, their circulation was supported heavily with vasopressors and I think he was an ARDS on top of preexisting pulmonary fibrosis—the inside of their lungs seemed to be filled up with black tar. Really terrible. I worked the night shift at UVa, so there were no “day in day out” bronchoscopies, it was usually people who were very sick. The Pulmonologists were all really cool, and it was fun to be in that assist role. They want saline, you have the saline ready. We maintained the bronch cart and assured we were ready for anything. It was actually quite fun, despite the seriousness of the job.

When a patient already has an endotracheal tube in, adding a bronchoscope can get dicey if you’re making sure they get their ventilation properly. High peak airway pressures can add some adventure, and you do your best.

Mind you, my RT skillz are over 10 years old, which sort of still amazes me, because I don’t know that the technology of bronchoscopy and mechanical ventilation has changed all that much. Then again, computer and internet technology has changed by leaps and bounds in the same intervening time.