A scary situation

Since I had had my bronchoscopy I was having trouble with the high-pressure on my ventilator going off. The doctors said I probably just had some plugs that need to break up. I guess when they look around down in my throat and chest there was a lot of old stuff that they needed to get out and not to mention the trauma created by the poking around. And I did get quite a few large plugs of mucus and old dried up blood. Then on Friday things began to get quite a bit worse. It started out with a lot of stubborn suction. Then it became more and more difficult to even use the ambu bag. At one point it would not work at all but luckily I repositioned and was able to get a little air. We figured the trach was probably blocked. On this particular day it was just me and the nurse at the house. My fear was that if she took the trach out and it was something more than simply the trach tube being blocked I would have been in real trouble. So we called 911 and she bagged me with great difficulty until they arrived. At one point my oxygen went down into the 70% range. After the fact my nurse that day said that if the paramedics had taken any longer she would have had no choice but to stop bagging me and just change the trach. So the paramedics come in and one of them takes over bagging me while my nurse gets ready to change my trach. As soon as it was changed it became easy to bag me and my oxygen saturation went quickly back up to near 90. After all that of course it took quite a while to get back to my normal range of the high 90s. After taking the trach out you could see how it was completely blocked in the end. And after sticking something through it we discovered that it was pretty much blocked through the entire tube. We ended up putting in a smaller size trach that I was using before the doctor told me to use the bigger one. I decided to let my through heal and keep the smaller trach in for a week and then I will try to put the larger trach back in.