My older brother recently became unconscious on Christmas day in 2021. He lives up with my mom in NorCal and went to sleep. The next morning my mom tried to wake him up but he was unconscious and not responding. He was rushed to the hospital, and the doctors checked him and verified that he had aspirin pneumonia and covid induced by taking an illicit drug called M30 laced with fentanyl.
It has been 4 days, and they monitored him checking his blood, status of his lungs, and also gave him an MRI to check if his brain was okay. They could NOT find anything damaging his brain and his body was healing. However, they said that this process will take months (not sure if this is true because I've heard stories otherwise). They suggested that we put him into palliative care and essentially wait for him to get out of it. He has opened his eyes (not willingly) and was able to move his hands but he is still unconscious.
The doctors said that he is not going to be the same when he wakes up. My brother is still young (30 y/o) and has a possibility of healing quickly because of his age. But they suggested we put him into palliative care. I thought palliative care was meant for patients who had terminal illnesses? I'm just having a hard time grasping or understanding this to a whole if his brain looks okay and his body is healing, what are the chances he is going to wake up and be okay again?
tl;dr brother in coma need help understanding process
Hello, I’m grieving the loss of my 14 year old dachshund who died after he had a teeth cleaning on Monday. I wanted to share details of my experience because I am grieving so hard right now and I can’t stop crying and trying to figure out what happened.
I need advice and some insight. I just want to know what could have been done differently. I truly am at a loss right now and I’m so angry/sad/obsessed/confused over this.
My dog just saw his main veterinarian a week earlier who said he appeared healthy and lively. He got his annual vaccinations and we left happy and hopeful he had years left in him. Then this week happens…
Monday morning - I take my 14 year old to get his teeth cleaning at the dentist. The Procedure requires blood work , followed by general anesthesia, and cleaning the teeth. I’m hesitant to go forward w/ the procedure because I felt uncomfortable with the anesthesia since my dog is so old and he just ate breakfast. but the dentist reassures me the blood panel will reveal any issues and determine if he’s healthy enough to get the cleaning under the anesthesia. So I say Okay. I leave my dog there around 9am and we pick him up at 7pm.
Monday night - my dog is completely zonked out from the procedure. They gave him some pain meds to hold him over (gabapentin). He won’t eat, won’t drink, just wants to sleep, and can’t even move or walk. So we leave him alone and let him sleep.. hoping he will sleep it off. Doctor advises us to warm up dog food with warm water to make it softer, mix some more pain meds, and begin the anti bacterial Clindamycin in the morning. We try the food method but my dog won’t eat it. He goes to bed on an empty stomach.
Tuesday morning - dog is still lethargic. Won’t eat and won’t drink. I considered forcing him to take the clindamycin but I did not because I did not want it to be on an empty stomach. Dog vomits in the morning, we clean it up and let him rest.
Tuesday evening - dog throws up again and so I call the dentist and we take him back in. It seemed VERY unusual he’s throwing up and still not eating after 24 hours of picking him up. Dentist gives him an IV, a steroid shot, famatodine (Pepcid), and returns my dog to me. He seems a little better at this point. He can raise his head, he can walk outside, he even licks my face when I ask for a kiss. I feel happy and hopeful. We pick up baby food from the store (per dentist advice), and get him home. He licks the baby food and drinks lots of water. He seems to
... keep reading on reddit ➡Hey everyone,
A bit of backstory. One of my rabbits, (Whimsy) started choking Thursday morning after swallowing a pellet incorrectly. I was able to get it dislodged using the Bunny heimlich, but afterwards, noticed my rabbit was still having difficulty breathing. I took her to the emergency vet ASAP, and they told me she seems to have aspiration pneumonia from fluid entering her lungs during the choking episode.
She has been at the vet now on oxygen since that occured, and has been put on antibiotics. At first, she seemed like she was improving, but now her breathing is much heavier. When they try to remove her from the oxygen chamber, she mouth breaths and tilts her head back. At this time, she is luckily still willing to eat, and does so despite the breathing struggles, but she is still struggling when removed from oxygen.
It's been hard to find lots of information about this type of occurrence with bunnies. Does anyone have any experience with this happening, or with any type of rabbit pneumonia? What was done, what was the outcome, is there anything else we can do to help her besides antibiotics + oxygen chamber?
My girl is a rescue who has not been treated kindly before me. She has dental issues which I feel is why she may have had trouble breaking up her pellets fully and why the choking may have occured. I just want to give her the best life possible for the time she has left with me and this is breaking my heart seeing her struggling. 😥
Any advice, experience, or kind thoughts are appreciated.
PD affects muscles so makes it hard to swallow properly. they can end up with food in the upper resp tract and get pneumonia. My dad had this back in april and spent 5 days in the hospital and came out fine.
he is usually very weak and tired and has been napping a couple hours in the afternoon. Today he went back to bed after lunch, refused to get up for dinner, was too weak and unbalanced for his walker. he slept til 6, I woke him for a half sandwich and he had started a temp. Around 9 or 10 it was up near 99.8 so he went to ER. He was totally out of it, very weak and somewhat confused. hard to tell because when he tried to talk it didnt make words. I think he had a ton of drainage on his throat that needed to clear.
What were his signs? he eats like he always has even tho he knows better. he makes the excuse his coughing and choking is drainage from his sinuses. There can never be anything wrong and he never needs to change how he does things. now thats landed him in the hospital again.
What we were told by neuro and doc. take small bites, chew well, take a small sip of water to get every bite down. What I add is, until you get that food down dont take another bite. Dont just keep piling food on food. this pneumonia can be very very serious. It breaks my heart to see my dad there and not knowing whats going on. Praying he comes out ok.
But please be aware of this problem, talk to your doc or neuro.
edit
They did a swallow study on him today and he passed, meaning he is able to safely swallow a variety of things, and he can eat and drink and take meds.
My partner (25F) has been very unlucky with her first dose of Pfizer - she developed severe nausea and vomiting which led to her developing aspiration pneumonia. After multiple negative covid tests and being blown off by GPs and phone lines she eventually had to go to hospital and will be in for three or four days on IV antibiotics. I know this is not common and don't mean to worry anyone (my first dose was drama free) but remember to keep an eye out for any chest pain or shortness of breath if you have been nauseous or vomiting after vaccination!
15M, 5’5 115lb, allegra and montelukast daily, no drugs or alcohol.
Tldr: Feeling chest heaviness and a sore throat with a cough, have felt this before but anxiety makes me think that it could be aspiration pneumonia, specifically pulmonary myiasis.
First off, I wanna mention that I’ve felt what i feel currently about every two months or so. I feel a sore/itchy throat, very mild chest soreness/heaviness and tightness, and a small feeling of shortness of breath, but I think it might just be my anxiety as I breath regular breaths and I do not feel pain when breathing in deeply. I notice that being around a fan or a cold a/c vent when im barefoot tends to cause this.
My worry right now though, is that I may have aspiration pneumonia. This may sound ridiculous but I have very bad health anxiety, so I always come to the worst conclusions. We currently have a fungus gnat problem in the bathroom, and some of them manage to get into my room. I left a container of mints open overnight, and ate one 4 days ago; this is when I realized that there was two gnats in my room, and I began to think that one of them couldve laid eggs in the mints. I was breathing through my mouth before I realized this, and thought that me breathing in couldve caused them to get into my lungs. I am now really worried that I could have pulmonary myiasis, even though there has only been 8 cases recorded worldwide. Ive felt heaviness in my chest, and I have a cough (which usually never happens when I feel like this before), and have been worrying nonstop since Friday.
What i am wondering is if it is normal to feel these symptoms as regularly as i do, what it could be, and also if it could be pulmonary myiasis. It really could just be my anxiety, but this has been making me feel worried for days. My parents think I am ridiculous for thinking this which I understand, but I cant get my mind off of it.
I had surgery with anesthesia on Wednesday, 8/11 and apparently something happened while I was still under anesthesia post-surgery. I couldn’t breathe oxygen on my own, I could only take in oxygen through a mask, and I had to be rushed to the emergency room. While in the ER they did a cat scan of my lungs and determined I had aspirated lungs and likely aspirated pneumonia. I’ve been in the hospital ever since (4 days and counting).
The lung specialists agree I aspired “a lot” during the surgery and they’re kind of mystified by how that happened.
I’m on oxygen almost 24/7 (my oxygen goes below 90 without it), I’m on antibiotics, and they started giving me a steroid yesterday.
Welcome any thoughts you might have - in terms of what might have caused this, the diagnosis, treatment options, and what my prognosis looks like. Thanks so much!
22F so last night i had a bit too much to drink (my own fault) i woke up this morning with a bad hangover and started vomiting. some of it wouldn’t come out and i felt myself coughing and almost choking on it because it wouldn’t come out so i was just gagging on it. I’m really worried i inhaled some vomit into my lungs. I’m not coughing or anything so is this a good sign? shall i still go to the ER???
Dad just barely survived his aspiration pneumonia after two weeks on antibiotics. But they say it will surely happen again no matter how careful they are as the dementia is progressive and starts to impact autonomic systems like the swallow reflex. So the doctors recommend he go into hospice altho he looks back to his pre-pneumonia self - dementia not withstanding. His advanced directive is no artificial mechanisms. So now we're left with the dilemma as to how much to treat him to his favorite foods and how much to preserve every last minute of life. What I understand is even people on feeding tubes often succumb to more aspiration pneumonia by just swallowing saliva down the trachea. Has anyone come to this fork in the road? It's so hard because even before dementia he didn't even want old folks home food (which is actually quite good) let alone hand fed mush. Yet on the other hand I don't want to accidentally bump him off with a big juicy steak.
Hi all --
Basically the title! It's been such a hectic morning, a suitcase was left open and a pill of 10mg Lexapro was in the bag that our 50+ pound German Shorthair Pointer got into.
I heard her crunch and swallow the pill and started panicking and ran out to get some hydrogen peroxide and a syringe.
I successfully induced vomiting with 2.5 teaspoons of hydrogen peroxide and by then it had been over an hour since she has ingested the pill. She threw up pretty much the entire contents of her stomach and heaved for about 2 minutes.
After that, her tail started lifting and wagging. She took a tiny sip of water and now she's running around wild, no issues whatsoever.
But looking back, in my panic I didn't seek veterinarian advice as I was also working and on the clock my attention was split and now I'm spiraling - is there danger of aspiration pneumonia? Are there symptoms to look out for? What is the likeliness of it?
I feel awful for doing this to her! Now I'm worried I did more harm than good in doing this to her.
Hi,
My 6-month old pup suddenly became lethargic last night after five hours at the doggy daycare. She looked tired, but she’s always exhausted after the playtime there, so I didn’t really pay attention to it at first. She drank water when we came home, then vomited the water right away (that’s when I got concerned), had runny nose, was salivât a lot, developed difficulty breathing and had a fever of 105-106.
Eventually I was able to bring her to the ER, where they suspected aspiration pneumonia and put her on oxygen. She’s expected to stay there for 2-3 days. At this moment she’s in oxygen kennel because her oxygen last night was at 86, getting IV fluids and antibiotics. She was static this morning, but later her blood cells got lower and her BP dropped, so she’s getting more fluids.
She was her usual extremely playful and energetic self just a few hours before this happened. At this point I don’t even know what to expect and how this could have happened.
Are there any milestones that I should be looking for? Like if she’s able to survive the next N hours and get her vitals to a certain point? She’s been in ER for 18 hours now.
Yesterday, my 6 month old doberman was throwing up, breathing heavy and was lethargic early in the morning. Instead of going straight to the ER we took her to an urgent care facility. They told us she seemed to have aspiration pneumonia, a fever of 104, needed oxygen therapy and that we needed to get her to the ER. We got her to the ER in minutes, they took her in and soon after they said that they had stabilized her. We were waiting for the blood test and xray results and they came out to ask us if we wanted to say goodbye. When we went in she was hemorrhaging out of her nose and mouth. It was horrible. She was suffering so badly we decided to have them put her down.
I have had numerous dogs and I have never seen anything like this. I am really at a loss. Is it possible that the vet made a medical mistake and caused the internal bleeding when they were working on her? She was not bleeding before she got there. Her urine was normal, she did have loose stools but there was not blood in it.
Has anyone else ever heard of this happening? She was otherwise a really healthy and happy dog. We are totally devastated and are trying to make sense of this senseless tragedy.
I didn’t see much info about this online and my vet’s rat specialist isn’t available until Wednesday but I can’t stop worrying so I thought I’d ask here in case any of you experienced this:
I was giving one of my rats, Fettuccine, some liquid prednisolone from a syringe last night (I’ve since read that you shouldn’t give rats liquid meds from a syringe and feel absolutely awful about it) and she aspirated some of it. I want to be clear that I was not force feeding it to her though, she absolutely loves the medicine and grabs the syringe immediately and starts trying to drink from it when I offer it to her. It was so scary: she was coughing and gagging and making this terrible honking noise so I rushed her to the emergency vet. When I got to the vet, I checked on her and she was breathing normally and acting alert/curious like she usually does. I listened to her lungs several times and didn’t hear any crackling or bubbling so I think she was able to get it all out. Since she was calm, no longer in respiratory distress, and her lungs sounded okay, I took her home.
During free roam time she was acting normal too: energetic, climbing on stuff, exploring, just being a curious rat. She happily ate her dinner, drank water, and her breathing looked okay during the few hours I watched her nonstop before I went to bed. When I woke up this morning, nothing had changed.
However, I’m now very worried about the possibility of aspiration pneumonia developing and really couldn’t find that much info about it in rats specifically. I’ve already called my vet and they said she should be okay unless I see the signs of pneumonia (labored or increased breathing, porphyrin, lethargy) but they didn’t give me a timeline. Do any of you know how long it’ll be before the risk of development passes? Thank you so much for taking the time to read this if you get this far.
I’m a 19 year old male with no health complications.
Hi everyone! I'm a very nervous bun mom so this whole incident has had me freaked out the last few days.
It happened 6 days ago. My bun goes crazy over pellets and I give them to her as a treat usually in a scavenger mat or toy. This time I just tossed a small amount of pellets on the ground for her and she was on them before they had even hit the ground.
A few minutes later I heard a loud sound like a cough or gag. I went to check on her and noticed there were still pellets left and she was now in her hutch. She looked fine, and was licking her lips and chewing. I noticed what looked like thrown up pellet mush beside her. As well as a couple of droplets of liquid and soft pellets near the remaining pellets. I know rabbits cannot vomit so I assumed it was food she spit out after choking. She did not seem uncomfortable or like she was having trouble breathing. Her nose was not wet either. She went back out and ate the rest of her pellets and then carried on with her day.
I kept a close eye on her all day and she seemed completely normal. Since then she has been normal in terms of behaviour, energy levels, and eating habits. She has lost 0.03kg since then and I haven't noticed any signs of respiratory issues aside from occasional sneezes (which is normal for her).
I contacted my rabbit savvy vet afterwards and she said to monitor her respiratory rate and let her know if it increases, but she thinks she should be fine.
I've read that some vets give antibiotics to rabbits after choking episodes just in case of aspiration. I'm very worried I won't be able to tell she has developed pneumonia and it will be too late by the time she gets treatment.
Has anyone ever had an incident where their bun choked and was okay afterwards (the blockage was dislodged and they didnt require immediate respiratory aid)? Additionally, anyone who has had a bun with pneumonia, what was your first clue something was wrong?
Any advice is greatly appreciated!!
