Hi, it’s Patrik Hutzel from INTENSIVECAREHOTLINE.COM where we instantly improve the lives for Families of critically ill Patients in Intensive Care, so that you can make informed decisions, have PEACE OF MIND, real power, real control and so that you can influence decision making fast, even if
you’re not a doctor or a nurse in Intensive Care!
This is another episode of “YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED” and in last week’s episode I answered another question from our readers and the question was
My Goal Is For My Sister To Get Off The Ventilator in ICU! What Else Do I Need To Do? Help!
You can check out last week’s question by clicking on the link here.
In this week’s episode of “YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED” I want to answer questions from one of my clients Mon, as part of my 1:1 consulting and advocacy service! Mon’s
mother is in ICU intubated and on a ventilator. Mon is asking why he is getting harassed by the ICU team to unplug their mom off the ventilator.
Why Am I Getting Harassed by the ICU Team to Unplug My Mom Off the Ventilator?
Mon: Hi.
Patrik: Hi Mon, how are you?
Mon: I’m doing good. Yourself?
Patrik: Very good. Thank you.
Mon: All right. All right.
Mon: I think my sister’s there and my brother, he should be coming in shortly. I was just with him on the phone. I think he has all the information. He’s the one that’s been kind of guiding us or pushing everything, taking the lead, and so on. And we’re desperate. We don’t know what else to do, hospitals, basically what they’re telling us is, they’ve exhausted every possibility and they’re not willing to do anything else.
Patrik: Right. Is that because of COVID or…
Mon: Yes. Yes. She originally got admitted because of COVID. And I think it was a Monday night. So, I think two weeks later, they connected her to a ventilator. You know, they intubated her and this has just been a disaster since then, so…
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Patrik: So she would be on the ventilator since more or less mid-October, early, mid-October?
Mon: Yes.
Patrik: Right.
Paul: Hi.
Mon: That’s my brother there.
Patrik: Right.
Paul: Okay. It’s not letting me do the face thing.
Mon: Click on the video. We can hear you. We just can’t see you.
Paul: No, I click on it and it kicks me off. Hold on.
Mon: Okay. It should be fine, I guess, as long as we can hear you.
Patrik: Yeah. As long as we can hear you. Yeah. Okay. Before we start, sorry, just to let you know how I operate. I have 15 minutes of my free time. I do have paid consulting and advocacy options beyond the free 15 minutes, but obviously my free time is very limited. I do this for a living and you know, I can… Yeah, obviously that’s how I work. If you want to tell me what your challenges are, and then I can tell you how I can help you and lay
out the proposal going forward.
Paul: Okay. So basically my mother is in ICU. And since day one, they intubated her, she’s got, what is it? 30, 31 days today. And then the thing is that since the first week they had her, they were just negative, stressing towards that she wasn’t going to make it, her age. And, you know, just keep telling… Everything that came out of their mouth was negative. And then after that, shortly after that, I started getting harassed, getting two,
three calls a day by different people, physicians, nurses, talking about dignity of life, got to unplug them, yada, yada, yada. And I was just firm, firm, firm, no, we’re not going to do that. So then it started getting a little more aggressive, like say, “Oh, she’s going to have a massive heart attack. Is that
what you want for your mom to do?”
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Paul: And her doctor even had the nerve to say, “Oh, well, I just called you to tell you that your mom’s heart’s going to stop today. So, you know, you should really think about what’s going to happen. Because she’s going to stop breathing today. And she’s probably going to have a massive heart attack.” So we never gave in. So we never gave in. So they stress, they basically did everything they have to do so they could unplug them with our
consent. That’s where we’re at right now.
Patrik: Okay. Okay. And are they telling you they’re going to unplug her tomorrow at one o’clock, are they giving you timeframes?
Paul: No. They haven’t given me a timeframe. I actually talked to them today, and before I have been giving… I didn’t let them give me a timeframe. I said, if I could get a week to transfer them or do something, and they gave me a week.
Patrik: Okay. Is any of you the medical power of attorney for your mom?
Paul: I am.
Patrik: You are. Okay. She was intubated for COVID, was she?
Paul: Yes.
Patrik: Okay. Do you know, have you been able to visit your mom?
Paul: Well, I just got visitation… We live from different places. And I got them two visitations, but it was through a glass, it was outside of the room.
Patrik: Okay. I understand. Okay. Generally speaking, nothing happens without your consent, generally speaking. What I can talk about at the moment, and I had a client call early in the week with someone that was telling me the same… That currently the laws that the client was talking about rationing healthcare laws. Now I have not found any information about that online. I could not verify that. Right? If we were outside-
Paul: I can send you a link to where I went.
Patrik: If we were outside of COVID times, nothing happens without your consent. Nothing whatsoever. Right? I have not been able to verify the information that the client was telling me earlier in the week, that there are healthcare rationing laws in places that can basically allow a hospital to do whatever they like. I have not been able to verify that.
Mon: Well, that’s the thing. Go ahead.
Patrik: Hospitals are very good and ICU’s are very good to pretend they are operating in a vacuum. They’re very good at pretending. And most people buy it. But how can-
Paul: Oh, yeah, they do, they don’t question them. They’re the professionals.
Patrik: Absolutely. Having worked in the environment for over 20 years, I can tell you, they’re not operating in a vacuum. They can’t just kill people without consent. That’s murder, that’s murder.
Mon: Yes.
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Patrik: Right? I tell you how I believe I can help you. With more clinical information, I could outline what treatment options there are. And the other thing that I can do as an advocate is just reminding them that nothing’s going to happen without your consent. Nothing. Right? And the negativity. I mean, that’s just a whole lot of crap, you know? I mean, again, I’ve worked in the environment. ICUs are always negative.
Paul: It was their tactic.
Patrik: Yeah. It’s a tactic. They’re always negative. But I tell you what, no matter what you decide, no matter what you decide going forward, 90 percent of ICU patients survive. That’s nine out of 10 patients in ICU survive. So the odds are in your mom’s favor. Now what it’s not saying, this is pure survival rate. We’re not talking about quality of life down the line. We’re talking about survival. We’re not talking about what that looks like
in six months’ time. Okay? We’re not talking about that. But getting out of ICU alive, the odds are in a patient’s favor.
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Mon: And that’s exactly what we’re looking for.
Paul: That’s what I researched for. And I mean, going into this, I knew I had to just fill my head up with as much knowledge as I could, because we didn’t really know much about this. And I just wanted to make sure that I knew what they were talking about. But I always questioned everything they said, because, you know, sometimes you just get a bad vibe from them and you just not… After that, I just didn’t cooperate with anything they said,
anything they told me, I just questioned. Because it was just hearsay and nothing concrete, nothing on paper. They couldn’t fax me anything, email me, nothing.
Patrik: Yup. Absolutely.
Mon: So now the thing is that… I mean, I noticed my mother kind of deteriorating a little bit and she has hypoxia.
Mich: That’s what they’re claiming now.
Paul: What they told us is, they keep telling me and trying to scare me and say, the first thing they said about two weeks ago, they said, “Your mom’s brain dead.” And I said, “Well, how that would happen when you guys did intubated her, and now all of a sudden she’s brain dead?” It was like, “Oh,
well, ARDS..” I mean, yeah, it’s viable, but I said, “Where’s the test that shows anything like that?” And then they said, “Oh, well, she’s unresponsive.” So then they opened her eyes and she didn’t want to close them anymore. She slowly started just coming back and we used to…Hello? I lost you guys?
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Mon: Yeah, yeah, we’re here. No, no, we’re here.
Paul: Okay, sorry. So then after that, she started coming back and we started telling her if she likes the song, if she wants us to play this song, blink. And she started blinking. And every now and then she’ll lose off. But for the most part, she’ll try it. You could see her trying to focus. And that’s where I said, “You know what? She’s trying. She’s not brain dead.” But they keep telling us… Yeah.
Patrik: If someone is brain dead, there would have to be testing going on. Your mom certainly wouldn’t blink her eyes if she was brain dead. So it’s just all negative scare tactics. If someone is brain dead, again, you would have to consent just for the testing for brain dead. Right? And that’s why I keep saying-
Mon: We haven’t consented to any of that.
Patrik: Exactly, that’s why I keep saying nothing happens without your consent.
Paul: Okay. Only thing that we consent to was one time that they said that… Because they called us and said she wasn’t urinating, that she was having kidney failure. Turns out that the tracts that they put on you to urinate, it was clogged. So that was their mistake, and they almost did dialysis on my mother because of that.
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Patrik: Yeah, sure, sure.
Paul: And that set her back a little bit.
Patrik: Sure. A lot of patients in ICU end up on dialysis because of kidney failure a lot. So you know, it is unfortunate, it’s often a side effect. Let me ask you this. How old is your mom?
Paul: 65.
Patrik: 65?
Paul: Yeah.
Patrik: Oh my goodness. She’s very young.
Paul: She’s… Yeah. And you know what? She’s been fighting. I’m so proud of her, you know? Because they call us and they say that she’s got hours. And I’m like…
Patrik: If she survived since Monday night, it’s unlikely that she’ll only have hours. Having said that, when someone is in intensive care, there are thousands of things happening simultaneously. And unless I know the things that are happening, it’s hard for me. She might have hours. She might. But I don’t know that. But let me ask you this, you mentioned in the beginning, they’ve given you a week deadline? Tell me about
that.
Paul: So she’s been calling, just being persistent. And the last time she called me, I just kind of cursed her out and said, “Man, that’s disrespectful. I told you not to ask me that anymore.” So then that was that. And then she called me, right now, it was actually today. She called me. She says, “Hey, the neurologist just checked her and you know, bad news. It’s just bad all around. The quality of life, if she does make it, that’s a big
if,” she said. “She’s not going to be responsive. She doesn’t know who you are. She probably can’t see.” And I said, “Oh, she knows who you are.” I’m like, “She responds.” I’m like, “That’s why when somebody walks in the room, she looks right at them and turns her head.” I’m like, “We told her to do that.”
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Paul: I said, “She responds.” I said, “You know what? It’s obvious that you guys aren’t trying to help. It’s just obvious, so just go ahead.” And I said, “If you give me a week…” She’s like, “Well, we’re just going to have to get to it because we did…” She said, “You know, we got all the specialists saying that basically, they’re wasting resources on her.” That’s what she told me.
Patrik: Oh, that’s terrible to even say that. That’s terrible to even say that.
Paul: I think it’s just because we’ve just been so… We stood our ground that we’re being more than pushovers, they just get irritated.
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Patrik: Yeah. Good. Keep doing that. Okay. Have they asked you to sign a DNR? Do you know what I mean by a DNR?
Paul: Yes. No, but we already stressed to them and I sent her an email saying that we didn’t want to be in a DNR. I told them, because I’ve read online, it said that right now in a pandemic, they’re not supposed… Because I went under the CDC or something. And in the bottom it said that basically, the patient’s family or whoever was in charge, had to directly tell them that they didn’t want to be in that list. Or a CCA, comfort care arrest, or
something like that. Because right now, the way things are, they’re not asking you and they’re not doing it. They’re not trying to revive anybody.
The 1:1 consulting session will continue in next week’s episode.
Kind regards,
Patrik
