Respiratory Therapy 101: Just Keep Breathing

Today is a well-earned day off here in the RT household. I plan to spend most of the day doing crap that I’ve put off for far too long, but the morning so far has been one of staring out the window and drinking coffee. Later today I am going to go talk to the local university about their BHA program. It sounds boring, but I’ve never claimed to lead an exciting lifestyle.

Tomorrow is technically a day off for me, but I plan to go to work anyway. I can hear you all now: Have you lost your mind, good sir? That is a fair question and one which I often ask myself, but I have not lost my mind yet. What good reason could I possibly have for going to work on my day off?

The answer is Tubes and Lines.

You see, when I left Our Lady of Immaculate Grace, I left because of years of built-up frustration. Our Lady treated RTs like nothing more than nebulizer jockeys. I had been volunteering on a hospital committee for a little more than a year in an effort to bring the RT and nursing departments out of the early 1900’s and into the modern world. But the committee’s hard work and advice were ignored by managers who feared change and physicians who liked power, so I said “the hell with it” and left for Sunny Flats.

Sunny Flats is a different sort of place. They let their staff work to their fullest potential. From the RT perspective, this means having the freedom to run ventilators the way you know they should be run and being able to use your clinical judgment to determine what your patient needs and get it done. We haven’t cut the physician out of the picture…they can always override our protocol…but most of them are more than happy to let us run the show, and with that we have improved patient survivability and lowered our rates of ventilator-associated pneumonias.

So anyway, I am going in to work to take the Tubes and Lines class. This class will allow me to have more of the therapeutic discretion that I crave: after taking the class and scoring a certain number of supervised attempts, I will become an Intubator and an Inserter. I will be allowed to intubate patients should they require intubation, and I will be allowed to use my clinical discretion to insert arterial lines into people who will be needing a fair number of blood gases. This is very exciting to me. At Our Lady, I couldn’t even move the ETT without physician orders; I couldn’t draw blood without written orders, couldn’t change O2 settings even by a margin without and order. Here at Sunny Flats, I get to do…everything. And it is a refreshing change. That is why I am going in on my day off: I finally have a chance to be a real respiratory therapist instead of a Floor Whore, and dammit, I’m going to go for it.

Have a happy Wednesday, everybody!