HFNO in Action

[PRODUCING STRIDOR] When did you have your radiotherapy and chemotherapy for your oesophogeal cancer? Finished on the 31st of August. Which was about about two months ago. Yeah. OK. And how long has the breathing been bad like this for? 2, 3 days. Can you swallow at all? I can swallow like that. I’m not allowed to swallow any food or liquid.

Can you lie flat at all? Dunno, haven’t tried. How’s your breathing now? Getting better. Getting better. Is it better with that on or without it? With.

So this is quite tight. And there are two aspects of this. This lower airway, there’s a small airway there. And there’s an airway there. We think that this area here is false cord swelling. We are about nine or ten minutes into the procedure, and the saturations are still 100. [PRODUCING STRIDOR] There’s obvious stridor. So you’ve got subglottic stenosis. And you have been short of breath for quite a while. How bad is the stridor at the moment? My daughter thinks it’s quite bad.

Which is more comfortable, breathing with this on or without it on? Which one do you think is more comfortable? With this. With this. So you feel more comfortable with the breathing? Yeah. It seems it softens it somehow. Softens it. Yeah. I don’t know how you would explain it. OK. But it’s interesting, because when you’re speaking, there’s no stridor coming through. So that’s just the pneumatic pneumatic splint effect happening.

Undertaking laryngoscopy, we are about to spray her very abnormal stridorous slit-like airway, and hence her stridor. She’s still being THRIVED. She’s gone up to 70 litres per minute. She’s on a propofol infusion. And her saturations are 99%. And that is after about 10 minutes of apnoea.

No resistance, no resistance. Might be a bit of resistance now. Rotate the tube.

OK. OK, so it’s definitely dropped– there we go. Push it in a bit more, bit more, bit more, keep going, that’s it.

OK, that’s going with no resistance. OK, just stop there.

Now, how much do you think that is Khalid, how many millimetres? 3 to 4. 3 to 4 millimetres.

So here we are, 3 to 4 millimetre airway.

Sats are 97.

Go ahead and keep it spinning. Just move the thing that’s right over the screen backwards. That’s it. That’s good. So that’s THRIVE. That’s the supraglottic flow vortices You see that? Yeah? Suction, please. Ready to come out.

OK, let’s do the other side.

Professor Rubin’s putting a rigid bronchoscope down. What we’re seeing is the paralysed patient with paralysed vocal cords, as in paralysed from muscle relaxants. Then as we go through, we will see a movement that takes place as a consequence of cardiogenic movements. So that’s mediastinal movements in a paralysed patient. And you can see that all the way down to carina You can see, you can actually see tracheal being pushed in and out, can’t you? That’s really helpful, John. And then if we come back, you can see movement’s taking place. And that superimposed on the supraglottic flow vortices is the mechanism by which CO2 is cleared and oxygenation enhanced during THRIVE.

So this is high-flow carinal flow with Hunsaker. Same patient with no THRIVE and carinal Hunsaker. Exactly the same patient. So the CO2 is higher, significantly higher.