During yesterday's post, I mentioned that Shirley was four hours into a sustained breathing test that would continue until she tired. Today, around 3:30 pm after nearly 32 hours they ceased the test and removed Shirley from the ventilator!
The next step is what they call "heated aerosol." This is similar but a little more sophisticated than the trach collar that was used at UW Medical Center. A small oxygen mask is loosely placed over the opening of Shirley's trachea tube. The room air supplemented by 40% oxygen is passed through a chamber that atomizes a pool of warm water. This makes the air warm and moist.
While she is still hooked up to a device, there are a couple of major differences. First, the heated aerosol only has a couple of dials for percentage of oxygen and flow rate of air. This is compared to the ventilator that had a large screen displaying all sorts of data points to literally monitor and evaluate every breath. In contrast, we now only have two readings from her overall vitals monitor: oxygen saturation and respiration rate.
The second difference is that instead of having a series of tube fittings connected from the vent to her neck, there is now just a mask placed around her neck over the trach tube. Previous, turning her head, could place strain on the tube and would cause irrigation (and potentially bleeding). Now, there is nothing actually touching the trach tube so she has more more freedom of movement.
Shirley continues to have back pain but was able to get up and hang her feet off the edge of the bed today. She didn't stay up for a long time, but this was her first time up in several days and so any length of time was encouraging.
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