No alarm with LMV off

[Big Al]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n7E4Pur5QM

[Alex's mom]

Scary. This happened to us when I left the room one day. When I came back, the vent was not alarming, the trach had slipped out but was still attached, and my little one was unconcious and not a nice color. I was so incredibly lucky that she was ok.


Our compromise (with the help of RT and Dr's) was to turn the LMV alarm on during the day when not attached to a pulse ox, and to turn it off while sleeping (and most likely to false alarm) because she was attached to a pulse ox.

One solution is to used a cuffed trach and inflate while sleeping which is what we do now.

I've also noticed that the vent in your video is set on pressure support. We've recently switched to volume control, and it will alarm low pressure with trach attached, but LMV off.

Nice video, thanks for posting.

[jamie]

i will have to watch this when i have sound, but Evan goes to sleep with a pulse ox and his trach cuffed, he has pressure support and his LMV on and still when his trach slides out I often only know from the gurgling he is making.

[kadiera]

We actually have a little adapter kind of like that which we used for silencing the vent when we were going to have it disconnected long enough to set off the alarms (like turning it on when switching back off the trach nose, or testing new circuits)