>I'm would like you to share some of your weird vent stories, etc. regarding
>making trach, vent, etc more comfortable. Also whether you have a cuffed
>or uncuffed trach.
Hi Annette! I can relate to air leakage while on the vent. I hate it! It
is very annoying and uncomfortable. I have not had this problem very often,
thank heavens.
I have a Concord/Portex Blue Line Trach Tube, cuffed, size 6. It doesn't
have the inner cannula. At one point my dr. was trying to prevent scar
tissue build-up around the stoma -- this seemed to bother him, but it didn't
bother me; thus, I went along with his suggestions twice and had some surgery
to remove it. He thought that by making the stoma a little larger and by my
wearing a larger trach tube this would help to solve the problem. Well, it
was pure misery! I couldn't tolerate the larger size at all. Finally after
about 2 weeks of messing around with different sizes, etc. I ended up with my
original type and size.
During this process we tried one with an inner cannula. I remember that I
had difficulty with suctioning while using that one. Furthermore, I wasn't
able to use my old trusty Q-Tip trick while I was out and about. With my
present tube, if I'm driving my car and I feel the need to clear my trach
tube, I just take the red cap off, blow out the secretions into a Kleenex and
use a Q-Tip to clean out anything that is clinging to the inside of the tube.
(I hope that I'm not making anyone sick here, but I think that you're pretty
used to this yourself if you're living with a trach.) I can do all of this
very well while driving! I've even done this in a store (very discretely, of
course, because I don't want to gross anybody out!). These times are few and
far between, but I've learned the hard way to take care of these little
nuisances immediately; otherwise, the problem snowballs! With the kind of
trach tube I use, this is simple and easy. I couldn't do it with the inner
cannula kind, and that was another thing that made me prejudiced against it.
One embarrassing time I remember is several years ago in December when I was
getting over a cold. I went to a Girl Scout craft fair in town. I coughed
or something, and my red trach tube plug flew off and landed down underneath
a table! I couldn't believe it! I really couldn't reach it, and I had to
ask one of the Brownie Scouts to pick it up for me! She did, I thanked her,
and plugged myself back up! I have no idea what the little girl thought, and
I didn't make any explanations!
One situation with my vent that created a few more gray hairs on my head was
when my husband, daughter, and I went on a week's vacation to New Jersey and
Penn. The day before we left home, my supplier brought me some more vent
hoses. Unfortunately I didn't check them out before we left; I just grabbed
several packages of them, and away we went. The first afternoon as we were
getting everything set up in our motel room, we discovered that I had the
wrong hoses. They didn't work at all on my vent! I was horrified! I was
panicky! It was about 4:40 p.m. We looked in the yellow pages and found
some home-health supplier who had on hand the kind of hoses that my vent
used. They closed at 5:00, and my husband and daughter had to locate this
office in a city where we'd never been before! They made it in time, bought
the hoses, and came back to the motel to set me up. Thank goodness things
worked out!
I always fear the electricity going out. My vent is hooked up to a marine
battery so if we do lose power, the vent immediately taps into the battery.
I also have a concentrator that takes O2 out of the room air and feeds it to
my vent, and this is on electricity. When power goes off in the middle of
the night, all of a sudden all of these alarms are screaming, I awake with a
jolt and panic in my heart! It's a mad scramble to try to find a flashlight
and to hook an O2 tank up to my vent. Furthermore, when the power goes off,
there goes my suction machine and my adjustable bed (which is electric).
Does anyone out there know of a good portable suction machine? One that does
not require electricity? I would really like to know.
Bye for now.
Carol