I was on sedatives earlier today, and I have no focus, so I'm just going to paste here an email I sent out to some friends an hour or two ago. I can't even focus enough to surf the web, and lord knows that doesn't take much.
You all expressed an interest in being updated on my cochlear implant journey as things progressed - the surgery was scheduled for today, but unfortunately was canceled (to be rescheduled for an as-yet unknown time later this summer). Here's what happened.
Because of the structure of my mouth and throat, I have what the anesthesiologists call "airway management issues". Essentially, my short neck and large tongue make it difficult to intubate me; since you don't breathe on your own when you're anesthetized, intubation is fairly important. Because of his experience last spring when I had ear surgery, the anesthesiologist wanted to try intubating me while awake (which is not nearly as scary as it sounds) because then I could keep breathing, giving him more time to work, and he could call it off if necessary without worrying about making me breathe some other way.
So around 1:30, I was given two drugs, both of which act as sedatives and have anti-anxiety and amnesiac effects (although to be honest, I do remember most of what happened. Which is fine, because it was fairly interesting. I did end up sleeping most of the evening away once I got home around 5, so the sedative aspect worked.). Over the next two hours, the head of anesthesiology at the hospital and four other doctors who are experts at this kind of thing tried to place an endoscope - a fiberoptic cable with a camera - down my throat to guide the breathing tube. Again, it was very interesting to be conscious for this, and not nearly as unpleasant as you might think, although my throat is a bit raw now.
The plan for next time is to put me to sleep like they usually do, since the main problem was that I have a very strong gag reflex. There's a small but not insignificant chance that they won't be able to intubate me anyway, but since I'll be asleep, they'd then be able to do a tracheotomy (they'll have a team standing by to do that). Unfortunately, they need patient consent, and the anesthesiologist said that although I seemed more lucid and aware than most patients on those sedatives, he still wasn't comfortable declaring me competent to make the call. The fact that I couldn't walk out the door to get my wheelchair without first walking into the walls on either side of it probably didn't help ... anyway, if they go that route, I'd move to progressively smaller and smaller trachs over the course of a few weeks or months and it would eventually heal over, so that wouldn't add much to the recovery time.
So we have to reschedule the surgery and that airway procedure, hopefully sometime in the next few weeks.
You all expressed an interest in being updated on my cochlear implant journey as things progressed - the surgery was scheduled for today, but unfortunately was canceled (to be rescheduled for an as-yet unknown time later this summer). Here's what happened.
Because of the structure of my mouth and throat, I have what the anesthesiologists call "airway management issues". Essentially, my short neck and large tongue make it difficult to intubate me; since you don't breathe on your own when you're anesthetized, intubation is fairly important. Because of his experience last spring when I had ear surgery, the anesthesiologist wanted to try intubating me while awake (which is not nearly as scary as it sounds) because then I could keep breathing, giving him more time to work, and he could call it off if necessary without worrying about making me breathe some other way.
So around 1:30, I was given two drugs, both of which act as sedatives and have anti-anxiety and amnesiac effects (although to be honest, I do remember most of what happened. Which is fine, because it was fairly interesting. I did end up sleeping most of the evening away once I got home around 5, so the sedative aspect worked.). Over the next two hours, the head of anesthesiology at the hospital and four other doctors who are experts at this kind of thing tried to place an endoscope - a fiberoptic cable with a camera - down my throat to guide the breathing tube. Again, it was very interesting to be conscious for this, and not nearly as unpleasant as you might think, although my throat is a bit raw now.
The plan for next time is to put me to sleep like they usually do, since the main problem was that I have a very strong gag reflex. There's a small but not insignificant chance that they won't be able to intubate me anyway, but since I'll be asleep, they'd then be able to do a tracheotomy (they'll have a team standing by to do that). Unfortunately, they need patient consent, and the anesthesiologist said that although I seemed more lucid and aware than most patients on those sedatives, he still wasn't comfortable declaring me competent to make the call. The fact that I couldn't walk out the door to get my wheelchair without first walking into the walls on either side of it probably didn't help ... anyway, if they go that route, I'd move to progressively smaller and smaller trachs over the course of a few weeks or months and it would eventually heal over, so that wouldn't add much to the recovery time.
So we have to reschedule the surgery and that airway procedure, hopefully sometime in the next few weeks.
posted by ismith at 11:13 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home