Tube delays....

Recently I talked about my really bad health experiences during 2001, which ended in November when I headed home with a permanent mini tracheotomy in my throat.

But what is a mini tracheotomy? Well it's a small hole in my throat occupied by a plastic tube that is used to clear my throat of mucus. It's not the type that you can breathe through as perhaps most people would think. To clear mucus, little catheters are threaded through the tube and the mucus is then suctioned away using a suction machine.

This is part of the tube insertion sequence as found in my book;

...The silvered wire is fed down the hole in my throat and the introducer with the mini tracheotomy attached is brought to the free end of the wire. Next the hollow introducer is covered in a water soluble lubricant and slid along the wire into my throat. It felt as if my whole windpipe was blocked but before I could think about that the introducer along with the silvered wire was quickly removed leaving the mini tracheotomy behind in my throat. Finally a tracheotomy tube holder is placed around my neck and fastened into place on the blue “butterfly” wings...

Read more on this and other life preserving interventions I've endured over the years, in my five star rated (rated by bookbag.co.uk) book DMD Life art & me here; http://duchennemen.net16.net/buymybook.html

Ebook here; smashwords.com




Foreword

I’m Ian Griffiths from South Wales. This book is a story of my life so far up to the age of twenty five years. I live with and suffer from the ill effects of DMD which stands for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. It is a severe muscle wasting disease and a life limiting terminal illness. It won’t kill you in six months in the traditional sense of ‘terminal’, but it’s far crueller than that, it steals every muscle in your body first and then kills you, anywhere up to the age of thirty. There have been cases of men living past that into their forties and fifties but only with drastic interventions such as ventilators and tracheotomies, more on this can be found by reading on.
I hope to cover a few things in this book, from a history of my childhood years to a more detailed history from sixteen years onwards and finally onto my current problems and triumphs. At times things I write may make you smile or may make you pause and think about the seriousness of life with this devastating disease. I really hope there will be a cure but currently for us supposedly ‘older’ guys with DMD (over twenty one), there seems very little hope. If I don’t see a cure in my lifetime, I hope my campaigning helps in some way bring it about for future generations, so another child won’t have to see their body wither and die before their time.