Mechanical Ventilation Quotes

terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression.

some accuse hospice and palliative care clinicians of promoting a “culture of death” when we allow dying people to leave this life gently, without subjecting them to CPR or mechanical ventilation or dialysis or medical nutrition.

In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one’s final days in an I.C.U. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or “It’s O.K.” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you.” People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system’s expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what’s most important to them at the end of their lives.

In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one’s final days in an ICU because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie attached to a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said good-bye or “It’s okay” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you.

she had a life-threatening illness and was too ill to speak for herself, she did not want any invasive measures to prolong her life: no surgery, no CPR, no mechanical ventilation, no artificial nutrition and hydration.

1. Do you want to be resuscitated if your heart stops? 2. Do you want aggressive treatments such as intubation and mechanical ventilation? 3. Do you want antibiotics? 4. Do you want tube or intravenous feeding if you can’t eat on your own?

In 2014–2016 this fear of Ebola was enhanced by the fact that no effective preventative or curative means were known. In well-resourced hospitals the standard of care involved what are termed “advanced life support therapies”—mechanical ventilation, hemodialysis, and intravenous rehydration, supplemented by medication to calm the purging and to relieve pain.

The Moffat Tunnel is a cathedral to engineering. Its simplicity occludes its sophistication, with the creation of nothing from something—the deliberate absence of rock amid incalculable weight. The finalized engineering marvel has a ventilation system that performs a complete air exchange within the tunnel in 18 minutes. The seemingly endless stone archway has intricately designed and perfectly positioned “umbrellas” to disperse alpine lake seepage to either side of the tracks. During construction, on February 15, 1925, tunneling progress stalled 1,100 feet directly under Crater Lake as 1,800 gallons per minute of water began flowing into the tunnel. At the suggestion of electrician K.S. Weston, crews ventured to the lake, cut through three feet of ice, and poured in 10 pounds of chloride of lime. Shortly thereafter, the presence of lime was detected inside of the tunnel. In an attempt to close the seam, a stick of dynamite was tossed into the lake, and the flow rate dropped drastically to 150 gallons per minute and then slowed to a trickle. Multiple times per day, the visceral vibration of mechanical thunder reverberates through the bowels of the earth.

In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillator or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one’s final days in an ICU because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie attached to a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place

The government-commissioned age-based ‘triage tool’ was the only guidance they had been given to deal with such difficult decisions, so they used it to systematically exclude the elderly, the frail and patients with underlying illnesses from critical care. Those patients would not be given life-saving mechanical ventilation regardless of the severity of their condition. This age-based criterion is alleged to have been applied by hospitals in London, Manchester, Liverpool, central England and the south-east. Many of those who died, after being excluded by the triage criteria, might well have survived if they had been admitted to intensive care. Of the few patients over the age of 80 who were given critical care treatment, close to four in ten were discharged alive.

As he shifted from one foot to the other, he recalled the fully mechanized saloon, he, Finnerty, and Shepherd had designed when they'd been playful young engineers. To their surprise, the owner of a restaurant chain had been interested enough to give the idea a try. They'd set up the experimental unit about five doors down from where Paul now stood, with coin machines and endless belt to do the serving, with germicidal lamps cleaning the air, with uniform, healthful light, with continuous soft music from a tape recorder, with seats scientifically designed by an anthropologist to give the average man the absolute maximum in comfort. The first day had been a sensation, with a waiting line extending blocks. Within a week of the opening, curiosity had been satisfied, and it was a book day when five customers stopped in. Then this place had opened up almost next door, with a dust-and-germ trap of a Victorian bar, bad light, poor ventilation, and an unsanitary, inefficient, and probably dishonest bartender. It was an immediate and unflagging success

On any given day in the United States alone, some ninety thousand people are admitted to intensive care. Over a year, an estimated five million Americans will be, and over a normal lifetime nearly all of us will come to know the glassed bay of an ICU from the inside. Wide swaths of medicine now depend on the life support systems that ICUs provide: care for premature infants; for victims of trauma, strokes, and heart attacks; for patients who have had surgery on their brains, hearts, lungs, or major blood vessels. Critical care has become an increasingly large portion of what hospitals do. Fifty years ago, ICUs barely existed. Now, to take a recent random day in my hospital, 155 of our almost 700 patients are in intensive care. The average stay of an ICU patient is four days, and the survival rate is 86 percent. Going into an ICU, being put on a mechanical ventilator, having tubes and wires run into and out of you, is not a sentence of death. But the days will be the most precarious of your life.

Do you want to be resuscitated if your heart stops? 2. Do you want aggressive treatments such as intubation and mechanical ventilation? 3. Do you want antibiotics? 4. Do you want tube or intravenous feeding if you can’t eat on your own?

He told her he was tired and didn't want any mechanical intervention. "No breathing tubes! No shocks, and no pushing on my chest. Just let me go." He was willing to try treatments that would make him feel better (comfort care), Rebecca says, such as wound care and pain management, as well as the treatments he was already getting. But, he said, "If they are giving it to me just to give it to me, then forget about it." At that point, Rebecca turned to her grandmother, who would be the ultimate decision maker should her grandfather become unable to make his own choices. "Well, darling," she said, "of course I would tell the doctors to do everything possible to keep my husband alive." Rebecca was stunned. She'd just had a lovely, candid, and specific discussion with her grandfather about his wishes. Hadn't her grandmother heard what he'd said? She then asked her grandmother to tell her what she had heard her grandfather say, and her grandmother repeated his wishes but said she loved her husband too much to let him go. "If he is with me just one more day, it would be worth it to me," she told her granddaughter. It would be worth it to her even if he were "hooked up to machines and not able to talk to me." Rebecca then turned back to her grandfather and asked, "Did you just hear what Grandma said?" He said he did. She asked how he felt about her going against his wishes and requesting a feeding tube, ventilator, shocks, and other treatments he had said he did not want. "Is that okay with you?" she asked in disbelief. Her grandfather said it was. "I am ready to go, but if it helps your grandmother to feel that she did everything possible for me, even if it is because she doesn't want me to go, that is okay. She is the one who has to go on living with her decision. If this is what she wants, then this is what I want because I love her." Rebecca realized in that moment that her grandfather's wishes were being honored; above all else, he wanted a death that his wife could live with.

A New York City study found a 97.2% mortality rate among those over age 65 who received mechanical ventilation.[272] The WHO’s “early action” ventilator guidance, citing Chinese journal articles, had killed countless thousands of patients across the world.

Although specific treatments for ALI/ARDS have been slow to emerge, the recent development of new strategies for mechanical ventilation that improve mortality, and fluid management strategies that reduce the length of mechanical ventilation, emphasizes the importance of identifying and appropriately treating all patients with ALI/ARDS. Although this point would seem to be straightforward, in practice, ALI/ARDS remains largely underdiagnosed,

All day long, her small compact body, sweating through one hospital gown after another, had been racked with coughing fits and spasms. Her long black hair, tied into a tight braid, had lashed the pillows like a whip. Her platelet count plummeted, her blood gases revealed she had entered into metabolic acidosis, her breathing became so faint that a mechanical ventilator had to be wheeled in; her major organs began to shut down like dominoes falling in a row. Lungs, liver, central nervous system; when her kidneys failed, Slater had had to immediately put her on dialysis.

pressure ventilation—pumping air into the paralyzed lungs through a tube inserted directly into the trachea—essentially adapting a technique of the surgical operating room to the polio ward. The subsequently designed mechanical positive-pressure respirators eventually replaced the iron lung tanks. However, even in 2007, some thirty to forty patients in the USA were still dependent on the iron lung. One, Dianne Odell of Jackson, Tennessee, who developed poliomyelitis at age three, has been in an iron lung for fifty-seven years, tethered to the machine twenty-four hours a day. The cost is $1,000/week

A ventilator mode that automatically adjusts inspired volume on the basis of the patient’s actual respiratory mechanics is intriguing and may help to minimize iatrogenic lung injury, particularly in settings where constant vigilance and frequent manual adjustment are not practical.

In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions.

One out of four mechanically ventilated patients get hospital-acquired pneumonia and around ten per cent of them die.