2012-04-15

Difficult airway management in the Surgical ICU

When it was the right time to intubate your patient's trachea, be sure that you can handle the problems arised after your induction of anaesthetics. The plan must include what your next step should be if you cannot pass the endotracheal tube into the correct position in the trachea. The problem of difficult airway management can be categorised to planned difficult or unexpected difficult airway.

If you encounter with a planned difficult airway, you can prepare ahead which equipment you would employ to get access to your patient airway. However, it doesn't mean that it would quarantee its success., so you need plan B for the next step if the first step does not work.

When you are facing the unexpected difficult airway control, one thing to keep in mind is a "Call for Help" because you would become fatigue after a couple of laryngoscope attempts. The other important thing to remember is don't forget to ventilate and oxygenate your patient!


In this patient, although we can intubate the trachea after another attempt, but it led us to another problem, unstable haemodynamics; hypotension, bradycardia, finally cardiac arrest. Oh my God >.< 

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