Respiratory Therapy 101 Just Keep BreathingRespiratory Therapy 101 Just Keep BreathingRespiratory Therapy 101 is a blog about my life in the world of medicine. I am a respiratory therapist, and my job is to make sure that people keep breathing. It is an important job because if they are not breathing, they are not doing anything else. 
Articles
Quote of the Day
2007-10-10 05:17:00 “We bronched this dude earlier in the shift. I guess he was eating when he got hit. We found chicken in his left lung and some kind of ketchup stuff on the right. I guess if we give him chest PT then we’ll be making a casserole.” Sorry, everyone. I thought it was funny. More About: Quote Of The Day , Quote
Shout-out and thanks
2007-10-10 03:42:00 A quick shout-out to say thanks to the Wisconsin Society for Respiratory Care for linking to me on their “Related Links” page. I’ve never been to Wisconsin, but I’ve heard it’s really quite nice there…and as a devoted cheese lover, I imagine I’d find plenty of entertainment in the culinary delights that the state is ... More About: Shout , Hank
Fun with Airways
2007-10-10 03:32:00 Today I finally got to intubate! For years I’ve been unable to intubate anybody, but today the perfect situation arose: a mellow physician, an easy patient with a thin neck and minimal dentition, and a patient that was mostly comatose. I used a Mac 4, which in this case cleanly swept the (slightly thick) tongue to ... More About: Airways
They never learn
2007-10-09 04:46:00 Some people are just dumb. It was about five o’clock in the afternoon when I got a call from my colleague who was working the ER that day. “Respiratory.” “Hey. I’m gonna bring you a guy. He came in a couple hours ago, found unresponsive. Massive overdose, he’s tested positive for pretty much everything and at this point ... More About: Learn
A happy 16 hours
2007-10-08 06:31:00 I just got home from my 16-hour shift at the Sunny Flats Medical Center here in Scumble County, down in the Southeast pocket of the United States. It was a surprisingly good day: I left today feeling like I actually made a difference for some patients. This was balanced by a couple of spectacular failures, ... More About: Happy , Hours
Not bad, score-wise
2007-10-07 02:48:00 My smelly patient from yesterday died this morning. No surprises there, I guess: it’s not often that people live through a perforated ventricle. A bigger surprise awaited a nurse later on in the day today: she lifted a patient’s johnny up, and found that his intestines had burst through the packing around a wound-vac in ... More About: Score , Wise
Oy what a day
2007-10-06 02:46:00 Busy day today. One of my patients was an operative mishap who had been left open by the operating team after she coded on the table during an abdominal procedure and the surgeon, in an attempt to be heroic, accidentally perforated her ventricle in the process of trying to open her chest. The smell coming ...
I could try real hard, or?
2007-10-05 02:26:00 …I could write this blog. Lucky for me, some new research by Gregory Miller and Carsten Wrosch shows that trying is way overrated. Seriously, dude, you’ll get an ulcer if you try too hard: Whilst following adolescents who had the option of achieving or abandoning a key goal, psychologists Gregory Miller and Carsten Wrosch found ... More About: Hard , Real
A terminal wean?or is it?
2007-10-04 05:36:00 The other day, I had to do a terminal wean on a patient who not half an hour earlier had been coded and extensively worked up in the emergency department at a cost of many thousands of dollars. In a tragically ironic way, the patients family had decided that they wanted everything done up until ... More About: Terminal , Term , Mina
EMS Haiku and ETCO2
2007-10-03 04:59:00 From the files of EMS Haiku , we have for you this evening a novel and exciting use of the ETCO2 detector: the early detection of bronchospasm! This, ladies and gentleman, is why our fine compatriots in the field should be given respect and admiration. Even as a trained RT I probably wouldn’t have picked up ... More About: Blogroll
At the risk of offending?well?everybody:
2007-10-02 04:40:00 At the risk of offending pretty much everybody in the entire world, I am reprinting here (without any permission at all) a recent strip from the comic Sinfest, authored and illustrated by the illustrious Tatsuya Ishida. I am reprinting it not in an effort to poke fun at any one group of people but to ... More About: Risk , Well , Offend , Everybody
They Stoled It
2007-10-02 02:03:00 In my time as a respiratory therapist I have heard many excuses from patients. Typically the patients do not take their control medication; their excuses range from “I can’t afford the medication” to “I just forget to take it every single day until I come to the hospital…three times a month.” But today was the ...
The Great Outdoors
2007-09-30 18:53:00 I was driving around yesterday afternoon in a mostly fruitless effort to locate a state park that sounded like a lot of fun. It was supposed to be countless miles of unspoiled wilderness, which in my head I had envisioned as old-growth forest and furry woodland critters of the sort I am used to. The first ... More About: Outdoors , Great , The G
The Transport from Hell
2007-09-29 06:23:00 I was standing around the ICU in a daze this morning. It was barely past 8, and the coffee had yet to fully hit my bloodstream and give me the extra zip to do my rounds in anything but a slackery manner. It gradually dawned on me that there were many other people standing around ... More About: Transport , Hell , Tran
New to the Blogroll
2007-09-27 20:30:00 Please welcome to the blogroll Postcards from Kiddieland, the tales of Dr. Bee, pediatrics resident. Dr. Bee is rotating through the PICU, which is a fascinating place to be indeed! Best of luck to Bee, and remember that no matter what the attendings might say, Albuterol really does not cure Croup. My Tubes&Lines class was intriguing. ... More About: Blogroll , Doctors
I Get to Do stuff!
2007-09-26 17:12:00 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 ... More About: Stuff , To Do
Mr. Crusty: Hopeless Case of the Week?
2007-09-26 05:32:00 First: I saw the best patient ever today. She was a young lady who needed a blood gas, and not only was she cheerful and cooperative, she was absolutely charming even with a needle stuck in her artery. I was totally impressed with her as a patient and left her room smiling and feeling satisfied, ... More About: Emergency Room , Week , Case , Hopeless , Pele
Sad
2007-09-25 04:52:00 It was a late night for the immigrant. He had been working hard all day, trying to make a living for his mother and his girlfriend. He was busy thinking about them, wondering what they were doing and anticipating his long evening with them at home. He was driving along in his battered but trusty ... More About: Emergency Room
Moments
2007-09-24 04:55:00 A few moments from last week that stuck with me. Sometimes a snapshot in time just sticks with you, and for me the best way to get it out is by sharing the joy with others. The first snapshot is a moment in time involving the trache-needing catatonic guy that I had in the unit. He ... More About: Moments
Real RT
2007-09-24 03:31:00 As of tomorrow morning at 7 AM, I am off orientation and free to roam about as an official RT. I have heard this stage of working here referred to as “being thrown to the wolves,” but I’m not concerned. With any luck I don’t make any enormous errors or have any unlucky moments on ... More About: Real
Another day-off post
2007-09-22 19:07:00 It’s my day off today, which means I don’t have any intriguing stories to tell you. So instead of coming up with my own original content, I will hijack the content of another blogger. Panda Bear MD has written an interesting piece about the way things are perceived and operated in the Emergency Room . Often, we ... More About: Post , Day-O
He?s Famous
2007-09-22 06:53:00 The cardiothoracic surgeon I wrote about the other day is on The Onion. More About: Famous
It?s the wrong trache, Gromit!
2007-09-21 04:14:00 Warning: I’m meaner than usual in this post and I don’t know why. I suspect it’s just me being tired. Have any of you ever seen those “Wallace and Gromit” animations? You know, the ones with the inventor guy and his dog who have wacky misadventures? One of my favorites was always The Wrong Trousers: To sum ...
Aaargh: a joke AND an expression of pain
2007-09-20 00:19:00 First: this is the best pirate joke ever. Today was the second to last day of my orientation. I was in our surgical intensive care unit. Despite its outward appearances of calm and mellowness, the SICU does manage to keep you busy. I was assigned to half of the unit with a preceptor, and we kept ... More About: Joke , Pain , Expression
Delicious Punnery
2007-09-19 01:41:00 Mielikki has written what may be the most deliciously punny take on talk-like-a-pirate day ever. It’s entitled…“C-P-Aaargh.” It gets better from there. Just go read it. ::: In the ER today we had a patient who ingested something like 130 pills of various sorts. He had recently been discharged from a local psyche facility, where they had prescribed ... More About: Doctors , Delicious , Deli
The Magic Ratio
2007-09-18 00:34:00 I was amazed to meet another RT today who is familiar with a rather obscure patient evaluation tool that I learned in respiratory school. I had been assigned to the Emergency Room with Tall Therapist, and despite the tri-county coverage area and the local populace’s wild antics, the ER was strangely still. We were discussing ... More About: Magic
Funny
2007-09-16 22:51:00 By way of Monkeygirl, I give you the ED of the future as envisioned by Dr. WhiteCoat. It’s the logical conclusion of all this patient safety nonsense. I mean, obviously some measures make good sense to keep patients safe from medical errors or preventable accidents, but there’s got to be a line drawn somewhere. More About: Funny
A little off-topic
2007-09-16 19:07:00 Another post that’s a little off-topic but relevant to my own personal life. In keeping with my decision to join in with the gun culture (and in keeping with my desperate plea for funds in the Arm the Therapist Fund) I’ve been reading through some of the backpages on “The Other Side of Kim.” Specifically, ... More About: Topic , Litt
It?s a zoo out there
2007-09-15 04:57:00 Mielikki, one of my favorite nurse bloggers, has written about how some of the rules at the zoo could easily apply to the hospital. This is very true. But my favorite bit was when she mentioned us RT types: -Oooh, look honey! The rare and exiting septic patient with a Swan-Ganz catheter! I hope we are ...
Librarian
More articles from this author:2007-09-14 22:53:00 Shelved in the W’s, the working notes of a hospital librarian in blog format, has compiled what may be one of the more comprehensive physician blog directories I’ve ever seen. Go check it out. I’m sure there’s plenty of interesting reading filed over there. More About: Libra , Librarian 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 |
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