What Really Happens When You Go on a Ventilator

(heart monitor and piano music) - Intubation is simply something we do all the time in our surgical areas. The problem with COVID-19 however, is in order to intubate you and put you on ventilator, make you comfortable and not gag on that tube, we would have to sedate you. Well, that requires medications. Medications that can affect your body in many ways. Long-term, we're really worried about the side effects. Memory issues, the weakness, profound issues with sleeping and wakening. And we know, from scientific studies that longer you're on the ventilator, the chances of good outcome are much lower. - Those moments, just before we add the ventilator, watching our patients struggle to breathe, it's hard to watch, as clinician, to see time and time again. This could be your last time that you get to speak to somebody. - Your family's not able to be there with you. And think that that's the hardest part is, as patient, you're basically lying there with all of these machines, keeping you alive and you're all alone. - We're pushing air in and you're breathing it back out. And that is uncomfortable. We also have to make sure that we maintain your airway so we're oftentimes putting tubes down there to suction things out of you. Some people have described it as painful. - Once you have tube down your throat, you can't eat anymore. You can't go to the bathroom. You can't bathe yourself. And every single day that you lie in bed, that weakness that you get piles up on top of each other. - People are lying in this bed in coma type state, but they're part of their brains awake. They're uncomfortable. They're having machines and catheters placed down and they're trying to make sense of this world. - I've had people come off of the ventilator and tell me all sorts of different things that are going on in their head because they don't understand what's going on. - see some of these patients in my office, so they finally got over COVID after many weeks of therapy and all these efforts but they have trouble going back to work. They have trouble with relationships. They go in looking young and healthy and they come out looking like they've aged 10, 20 years. What's that like when they get home, if they do survive. - In the beginning, people can't hold their head up. They can't grip or squeeze because they're so weak. Sometimes to the point where they can't stand because their ankles are so tight from lying in bed so long. They just feel like the person that they were, before they got sick, isn't there anymore. - Regret to me is the motion that see the most. And that really gets to me because so many patients, community members, staff, people know regret if they haven't gotten vaccinated. They wonder. When my responsible for somehow, somewhere, someone getting sick or myself getting sick. Many do not ever come to terms with that. So just don't regret. Get vaccinated. It's the best thing you can do for you and your loved ones.