RESEARCH ARTICLE
SHORT COMMUNICATION A Potential Method for Safe Recovery from Recognized Inadvertent Esophageal Intubation
Brian Milne, Jessica E. Burjorjee*
Department of Anesthesiology & Perioperative Medicine, Queen’s University and Kingston General Hospital, Kingston,
Canada
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2013Volume: 7
First Page: 15
Last Page: 18
Publisher ID: TOATJ-7-15
DOI: 10.2174/1874321801307010015
Article History:
Received Date: 28/04/2013Revision Received Date: 15/05/2013
Acceptance Date: 16/05/2013
Electronic publication date: 14/6/2013
Collection year: 2013
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
How to proceed following inadvertent esophageal intubation and what to do with the misplaced endotracheal tube is controversial and not specifically addressed in the difficult airway algorithm from the American Society of Anesthesiologists.
Here we describe a simple and effective strategy to manually ventilate the patient with an air cushioned face mask while leaving the endotracheal tube in the esophagus to provide a conduit for stomach content suction until definitive endotracheal intubation. We describe clinical circumstances in which we used this method successfully.
Whether to leave the endotracheal tube in the esophagus or what to do with it should be specifically addressed in difficult airway algorithms.
Keywords: American Society of Anesthesiologist’s (ASA) Difficult Airway Algorithm, Esophageal intubation, Difficult airway, Intubation method, Patient safety.
