Greetings:
I am Philip. I needed answers to the issues and peculiar problems of living
a normal life at home with a tracheostomy tube in my throat. The medical
community focuses on trach maintenance procedures most appropriate to hospital
and clinical settings, and these do not always transfer well to the home
environment. I turned to the Internet to locate experienced trach users
and, with their patience, learn from them. Besides my inquiries of the
medical profession and personal acquaintances, I am posing a series of
questions to two groups of people, those that have trachs, and those that
use ventilators with trachs. These pages result largely, but not exclusively,
from the selected responses of members of the group forums: NeckBreathers
and Vent Users. To them go my appreciation, and my thanks.
I find that long term trach use is still a rare thing in the medical profession, and there have been relatively few resources spent gathering an authoritative body of knowledge about this subject. The people who have experience in home trach use are geographically distributed and often seriously isolated, leaving people who need the knowledge of that experience in a predicament. This situation will change when the number of home trach folks reaches a critical number, but until then the Internet is our friend. We can use it to build bridges to each other. People helping people is a traditional remedy for desperate situations.
I got the idea to do the web site when I looked at the text files I had
been cutting and pasting together on different trach topics that I was
collecting and realized this is useful information on this very rare subject.
I have rudimentary HTML skills and a web site, I thought I would move the
topic list to the web for others to use.
The design is a simple topic list in a peer to peer format: as in so-in-so
is an issue, how have others adapted to this problem? Answer. Answer.
I chose this format because it's simplicity appealed to me ascetically, and that it would be efficient to create, use, and maintain (which my current energy level appreciates).
The second ascetic point is that with people using their own words to describe
their answers to the questions posed, it gives a sense of the community
of the people involved - a demography, if you will. Or something like that.
What ever. Anyway, I like it.
I foresee the web site to be useful in two ways.
(1) An easy read for people seeking an overview of trach and vent practice as practiced by the people practicing it.
(2) A resource for people seeking ideas on a trach or trach-vent topic.
I would also like for the people who contribute to the web site to sense
they are a partner of the project, integral and essential, by including
acknowledgement of them with their excerpt, and get this done without exposing
them to spammer rascals.
Topics are chosen because they are inherent with trach use. The first list
of topics are the questions I, as a new trach owner, have submitted to
trach listservs. The answers I received were immediately useful to me.
Sooner or later, any topic of interest to trach users can eventually make
the list.
Please visit the web site from time to time and if you have a problem that
is a little sticky, bring it up in NeckBreathers or Vent-Users forums,
or drop me an e-mail. We'll work it out.
