Transcripts
DR. CORNEL:
But that didn't continue. The
next day, the 21st, really the night of the 21st
through to the 22nd of October she started to
deteriorate again quite unexpectedly. The
dialysis seemed to be going well and electrolytes
were corrected. She was conscious, alert. She
should have been getting better.
What was happening was that she
was becoming increasingly short of breath and the
chest x-ray showed gross pulmonary edema and
pleural effusion, so water in the lungs, water
around the lungs.
The intensive care staff put in
drains to get the fluid away from the pleural
cavities but she did not improve with that. The
shortness of breath just got worse and worse.
She was drowning, in fact. And they decided to
go with artificial ventilation with an
endotracheal tube.
Her brain was really clear, in
fact, Dr. Simons, the intensivist at this time,
told me that as he was describing to her what
he was going to do to put her on the
ventilator, she suggested that instead of talking
about it he should get on with it so that she
could breathe!
