Respiratory Therapy 101: Just Keep Breathing

Win some:

Three year old girl presents with multiple facial lacerations. She is screaming, terrified, frightened of the pain and of the strange people in white and blue who are doing things to her. With a little smooth talk from a pedi nurse and a little bit of modern chemistry, she calms down enough that the doc can suture her face back together. Once the stitches come out she’ll be fine.

27 year old woman presents with sudden onset shortness of breath. She’s an asthmatic who hasn’t had any problems in a few years. With some steroids and some aggressive treatment, she’s relieved of her symptoms and out the door again in four hours.

Lose Some:

A man comes to the ER early in the morning because he is uncomfortable and he feels like he cannot catch his breath. He is triaged into a room in the back and given a treatment. While waiting on a lab result he suddenly has an episode of bradycardia and begins to complain of chest pain, at which point he is whisked to the Oh Shit Room. His respirations become noticeably labored and he is intubated. He then proceeds to code. After coding on and off for three hours, he is pronounced dead. He was a classic “walkie-talkie.”

A nursing home resident is brought to the ER by ambulance. The nursing home’s stellar staff observed a total lack of movement and respiration on the part of the patient and called 911, whereupon the paramedics observed that she was in fact mostly dead. However she had a pulse, so she was trucked with lights and sirens to the ER. Just as the medics rolled in the door she went asystole. After a few rounds of CPR the doctor asked if anybody had any objections. When nobody spoke up, he nodded and left the room. As he was walking out somebody asked him, “So you don’t want to keep going?”

The doc shrugged his shoulders and looked around.

“Nah.”

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