Obsgynaecritcare

(Hypothetical case) You are called to the PACU to review a patient, who despite face mask oxygen has saturations of only 88%. She is a woman in her 50s who has just undergone a 3 hour laparoscopic hysterectomy for endometrial cancer. She has a BMI of 48, has been a smoker for 30 years, and had a chest infection 3 weeks ago. When she walked into the hospital earlier this morning she was breathing relatively normally. She had a long period of time when we she was steeply head down, there was a pneumoperitoneum of gas pushing on her lung bases and we were positively ventilating her with the anaesthetist choosing what gas mixture, pressures and ventilation modes they used. What has happened during this operation and anaesthetic that now she has serious respiratory dysfunction here only a few hours later in PACU? Are there any strategies that we could have employed intraoperatively to try and minimise or avoid postoperative respiratory problems like this? Join Lloyd and I as we discuss this thorny issue