Farmer 'N The Dell

The Infamous PAPR

You may be wondering what a picture like this is doing in a healthy lifestyles blog, but if you read my earlier post “Tales From the Trenches,” you know that health is often as much a consequence of luck as it is of good behavior and genetic good fortune. And let me tell you, I feel lucky!

 Swine Flu is sweeping through the nation, and as an anesthesiologist I see the sickest of the sick– the patients who get the flu so bad that they wind up on a ventilator and often die. What’s most appalling is the age of our patients. These patients are young, in their 30s and 40s, and sometimes they have nothing wrong with them except the flu. But it’s enough.  These people are terribly sick.

I get called to put the breathing tube in before the patient is placed on the ventilator. It’s one of the most dangerous jobs in Swine Flu care, because our faces are very close to the patients’ faces. All of the respiratory germs get almost direct access to us. That’s why we wear the PAPR.

 

PAPR stands for Powered Air Purifying Respirator, which is the safety device you see in the picture above.  The respirator basically sucks up contaminated air, purifies it through a HEPA filter, and then blows the purified air around your face. It’s our safest protective equipment for dealing with Swine Flu. But a PAPR is only as good as its battery, and mine failed me a week ago as I was slipping a breathing tube in a desperately ill 33-year old man. The head covering suddenly felt warm inside, the face shield fogged with my breath, and the soft blowing sensation stilled. I looked down at the power generator on my hip in shock, pushed at the power button twice, heard nothing except the pounding of my heart. I couldn’t run for cover. My patient was suspended in the dangerous zone between anesthesia-induced unconsciousness and rescue in the form of a ventilator and 100% oxygen. I placed the breathing tube, confirmed it was in the windpipe and not in the esophagus, and handed over care to the respiratory technician.

 

I walked out of the room in disbelief, dropped the PAPR on a chair, and said quietly to the nurse, “You’ve got to charge those things.” There was no use yelling. The exposure had already occurred. I went home to wait out the incubation period.

 

Seven days have passed, and I still feel well. I am lucky. The 33-year old patient isn’t so lucky. He’s still on the ventilator waiting for his lungs to recover enough so that he can breathe on his own.