ARDS X-ray Progression

[zcubed]

I hope that this was a good place to post this; I know that nurses who are in the MICU, CCU, and SICU would be familiar with this but from what I hear from some nurses, who are ARDS survivors, they say that they had never heard of ARDS before, or if they did, they really did not have a comprehensive understanding of the syndrome. I thought that this might be something some of you would be interested in.

We have just finished our poster for this May's ATS conference and our webmaster has poster it on the website. On it, we have displayed three X-rays, "Radiographic Findings in ARDS" which demonstrate the rapidity of ARDS. I am hoping that it will be helpful to lay people, to those who do not encounter ARDS on a regular basis, to families who have difficulties in understanding how quickly their loved ones go from having whatever their precipitating cause may be, to being critically ill, as well as the media who cannot comprehend ARDS at all.

http://ardsusa.org/images/ARDSPoster04.pdf

This is a pdf file and depending upon your computer, it may take a couple of minutes to load. Once you open it, you can enlarge it to see the x-rays clearly by increasing the percentage in the bottom left.

We also just finished this year's ARDS Quilt, with a tribute to nurses! :)

(top row, to the left, red heart, it says, "Nurses are Angels")

If you care to look, this is a jpg file.

http://ardsusa.org/images/quilt04lg.jpg

Eileen

[jaimealmostRN]

That is a beautiful quilt. I am still in school, but was just studying ARDS for our up and coming exam. It's a sydrome that comes on sooo quickly that one must know it's impending signs (increases resp. rate, white-out CXR) or the patient may not survive. Thank you for educating both health care workers and family about this horrible complication.

[zcubed]

Thanks; Dee, who did much of the work on the quilt, is an ARDS survivor herself. She is a college professor for a small college in Saginaw, Michigan (think of the Simon and Garfunkle tune) and after she had ARDS, she went home on oxygen for about a year. Then she had tracheal stenosis and had a tracheal resectioning. All of this after only a couple of weeks on the vent, and only about three weeks in the hospital. I say only, because that is in contrast to my eight weeks on the vent and nine weeks in the hospital which just makes me realize how lucky I am to have so few post ARDS issues.

Here is an article that was published about Dee:

http://ardsusa.com/livinghealth.htm

Anyway, I would be interested to see what others think of the project, having the x-rays there for people to be able to visualize how quickly this all happens. Thanks, Eileen