tmasters
Senior member
- Joined
- Feb 19, 2008
- Messages
- 532
- Reason
- PALS
- Diagnosis
- 08/2008
- Country
- US
- State
- California
- City
- Anaheim
Well, sort of... Help!
The RT came to my house this morning with my new Trilogy respirator. This has been in the works for 3 months so I was glad to see him.
"Mark, have you ever worked with a Trilogy before?"
"No."
"But you've been trained on it, right?"
"Oh, yeah."
"Are you familiar with ALS?"
"I had a patient once with ALS." Hmmm...
So he plugs it in and turns it on and immediately alarms go off (and it's LOUD) and air starts coming out. He can't figure out how to keep it quiet. He finally decides to not worry about it. My daughter is (was) sleeping upstairs. Sorry for the wakeup call sweetie, but it IS 11AM after all.
So in the midst of all this noise he gets the paperwork out that has the doctor's prescription and he isn't able to match up the settings terminology between what the Trilogy calls them and the prescription. He tries and tries for about 10 minutes and he starts to give up. I can tell he has no clue. He had lots of trouble just navigating the menus. I was actually pretty embarrassed for him.
Finally he just says "let's just try it" and tells me to put the mask on but there was hardly any air flow and it was difficult to breathe so he was trying to make adjustments but it wasn't helping.
Then he noticed the settings were actually for a different type of ventilator, not the Trilogy. This explains the terminology differences.
I was afraid he was going to leave and take the machine back with him. So I called the prescribing neuro's office. Speaker phone. He's out of town, but the nurse who runs the clinic repeats the settings we already have in the prescription. She says they have prescribed LOTS of Trilogy's and NEVER had a problem with an RT not being able to program it. What do we do? Well, she called one of the RT's that works in the clinic and that RT relayed some settings ranges that they typically use for ALS on the Trilogy
Anyway, he finally ended up setting it in "PC" mode (pressure control), with the settings I told him I'm using with my BIPAP. I could have done that.
My question is, for you Trilogy users, what mode are you using? Do you have separate day and night modes? Do you use sip-and-puff during the day?
I requested a different RT for my follow-up on Friday.
Thanks,
-Tom
The RT came to my house this morning with my new Trilogy respirator. This has been in the works for 3 months so I was glad to see him.
"Mark, have you ever worked with a Trilogy before?"
"No."
"But you've been trained on it, right?"
"Oh, yeah."
"Are you familiar with ALS?"
"I had a patient once with ALS." Hmmm...
So he plugs it in and turns it on and immediately alarms go off (and it's LOUD) and air starts coming out. He can't figure out how to keep it quiet. He finally decides to not worry about it. My daughter is (was) sleeping upstairs. Sorry for the wakeup call sweetie, but it IS 11AM after all.
So in the midst of all this noise he gets the paperwork out that has the doctor's prescription and he isn't able to match up the settings terminology between what the Trilogy calls them and the prescription. He tries and tries for about 10 minutes and he starts to give up. I can tell he has no clue. He had lots of trouble just navigating the menus. I was actually pretty embarrassed for him.
Finally he just says "let's just try it" and tells me to put the mask on but there was hardly any air flow and it was difficult to breathe so he was trying to make adjustments but it wasn't helping.
Then he noticed the settings were actually for a different type of ventilator, not the Trilogy. This explains the terminology differences.
I was afraid he was going to leave and take the machine back with him. So I called the prescribing neuro's office. Speaker phone. He's out of town, but the nurse who runs the clinic repeats the settings we already have in the prescription. She says they have prescribed LOTS of Trilogy's and NEVER had a problem with an RT not being able to program it. What do we do? Well, she called one of the RT's that works in the clinic and that RT relayed some settings ranges that they typically use for ALS on the Trilogy
Anyway, he finally ended up setting it in "PC" mode (pressure control), with the settings I told him I'm using with my BIPAP. I could have done that.
My question is, for you Trilogy users, what mode are you using? Do you have separate day and night modes? Do you use sip-and-puff during the day?
I requested a different RT for my follow-up on Friday.
Thanks,
-Tom