sign language alphabet

[darkoshi]

random thought:
It must be horrible to be intubated and not even able to communicate something as simple as "I am very cold, please give me blankets".

It would be good to learn to finger-spell the alphabet signs, so one would still have a way to communicate that didn't require pen&paper or keyboard, etc.
But then again, I wonder how many medical professionals are able to recognize and understand it?

.

And then again, if they had to strap down your hands to keep you from pulling out the tube like they did with Qiao after his car accident, that wouldn't help much. At least they keep you mostly in a daze so maybe you don't even feel things like being cold.

Comments

[marahmarie]

My mom was intubated after getting pneumonia after surgery. It was horrible, as apparently they didn't use enough medicine to knock her out all of the time. So she'd come to once in a while and try to pull her tube and so eventually had to be kept in place, as well.

She'd try hard to communicate (probably to impart that she wanted the tube out, which she'd motion at and pull on to tell me so). I gave her pen and paper at one point (she had a hand free at the moment) and she very much wanted to write but could only manage a slashy bolt down the paper.

I always wondered about the blankets, is what I came to say. ICU was a frozen tundra day and night, so much so that in mid-summer I'd bring a jacket and not take it off again until I warmed back up again outside. I always wondered if she needed more blankets but could not say.

Intubation weakens a lot of people, especially with another ongoing illness, so they're never quite the same. She wasn't, she was more frail and her life force seemed comparatively more faint. Other than that, though, she got to where she was pretty much herself again once she recovered.

[darkoshi]

I tried using a notepad and pen with Qiao too. Sometimes it worked, usually simple one or two word things he was trying to tell the nurses. The rest was indecipherable or didn't make much sense even when I could figure out the words. I think he wasn't able to separate his dreams/hallucinations from reality. I asked him later if he had any memory of that time, and he didn't.

I'm mixing up some things in my memory now myself, but I still have notes from back then. The tube he pulled out one of the times was a feeding tube that went in through the nose, not the breathing tube. But he might have pulled that one out too.

My memories of hospitals, especially the pre/post surgery areas, are also of them being very cold. Which is part of what sparked that thought in the first place.