Word: vent
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Every day he got a little stronger. "I was sucking for air, my eyes were going up in my head, but eventually I breathed on my own--for 7 1/2 minutes"; 7 1/2 rose to 12, to 15, to 30. Today he can go off the vent for hours...
...nurses. The van has to be equipped with an oxygen tank, emergency meds and an Ambu bag, which is like a balloon used to pump air into someone manually. We had an episode when I was coming back from New York one time in the winter, and the vent failed just as we were coming up the driveway to the house. We needed the Ambu bag to ventilate me until we could get up to the house. And we were stuck in the driveway in the snow. The nurse was ventilating me as Dana was trying...
...room, for which he was grateful, but it made him feel isolated from the other patients. Two security guards were posted outside. Reeve's first "pop-off" occurred in that room. A pop-off happens when the trach is not secure. Unless one is used to breathing off the vent, breathing is impossible...
...came off in the evening. The alarm is sounding on my vent, and I'm making this clicking noise with my throat--clk, clk, clk--and the security guy comes in and asks, 'Are you all right, Mr. Reeve?' The vent is screaming, and I'm clicking. All he needed to do was put the hose back in place, but I guess his instructions were that his job was security, so he goes off to get a nurse. Now I've missed maybe four, five, six breaths. You don't feel pain when this happens; you feel panic. I only...
...part of his treatment came with its own attendant fear, which was enlarged by his imagination. He was learning one of the penalties of living solely in one's thoughts. Merely the idea of being put in the shower terrified him. "I thought, 'What if something happens to the vent in the shower?' 'What if the water gets into the trach tube?' And so on. To get you into the shower, they've got a kind of hammock to which they transfer you from the bed, and you're lying there in a kind of net. I was afraid...