Cinnamon Trust and the 3Peaks this years challenge

We are joining Team Onswitch for an assult on the 3 Peaks...and cycling in between.
The target is £3000+
@CinnamonTrust  http://www.everyclick.com/teamonswitch

Polly put the Pulse Oximeter on Part 1

1993, I have owned a real company for about a week and suddenly the phone is ringing! Shocked I answer.."Thames Medical how can I help you?"

"I understand you can help me monitor a patient...who isn't human" said the voice on the other end.

This has to be a wind up I think, who outside of a few colleagues from my previous company knew of the work I had done in 1987 in the Lion The Dentist and the Pulse Oximeter, this long before blogs and social media and the internet?

I called the company I was collaborating with, Pace Tech in Florida, and asked them if I could make a few changes to their multi parameter monitor.  They agreed and so using my original data from 86/87 a few short weeks later I was off to Ireland to meet my new client, to spend a week teaching him and his team, how to monitor some of the top race horses in Ireland under Anaesthesia. I had a fabulous time there and learnt so much.

Returning home I sent one of the pictures I took to the Veterinary Times who ran the picture and a short column article. I received 6 phone calls from people Vets who wanted to know more about this strange thing called a Pulse Oximeter and what could it do for them..

The 6th Vet I met, was the company Vet for a company who were just about to launch a new anaesthetic drug on the veterinary market..Propofol...a drug I knew well from many years previously when I helped The Dentist and the Milk of Human kindness..

The thrust of the drug launch was to be safety in anaesthesia and the time was right or was it?

Hall and Clarke had just published Mortality in Small Animal Anaesthesia and here was this "new" safe wonder drug..but one piece was missing...the level of anaesthetic monitoring..could this really be the Pulse Oximeter and could it really be the one I had in my bag...

This was to be decided by a certain Dr Taylor of Cambridge University.

A meeting was organised and I drove up to Cambridge meeting the company rep Graham Walsh. I remember the day well, we were ushered into what is now a document store but what was then X-Ray where I was invited to set up the pulse oximeter initially on a dog. I was asked lots of questions by lots of interesting and interested people but after a couple of hours I was beginning to get a little frustrated.  I conveyed this to Graham and was told to be quiet!

I explained that I had come all this way to meet Dr Taylor and up till then still hadn't met him! ( I was just about to give up on the whole Veterinary thing and concentrate on the pre hospital/ trauma field I so enjoyed).

I learnt so much that day!

Dr Polly Taylor turned out to be one the most agreeable, positive and knowledgeable persons I have met, she had already evaluated the pulse oximeter and the special lingual probe I had built and had ordered 6!

With her agreement came the sign off from the drug company that they would work with me and together we would all promote "Safety in Anaesthesia" and so Thames Medical grew a dedicated Veterinary Anaesthesia Monitoring arm, shortly later I was invited to join the Association Of Veterinary Anaesthetists and the work that had been so viscously condemned by my boss 6 years  previously was going to be used after all.

We changed the way we do anaesthesia today, thank you Polly.

The Lioness, The Dentist and the BBC

"What do you think Mike? Deep or light?" whispered John, the Anaesthetist after he clambered round the patient, over the wires, cables and general paraphernalia that filled the small cage we were working in.

I was going to ask you exactly the same I replied.

We had both just checked the vital signs, respiration rate, depth, palpebral reflex, and a quick look at the monitor said the patient, a Lioness at Chessington Zoo was sound asleep. The Pulse Oximeter, confirmed the mucous membranes, nicely pink. The Capnograph agreed on depth and rate of breathing, the blood pressure nicely normal, the ECG just doing its thing.

Peter Kertesz, the specialist dentist, said everything was fine as he worked away in the lions mouth headlight illuminating his way. Not that Peter needed the headlight today, because not only were we sharing the space with Peters dental nurse, Sam, the head keeper, a sound recordist, camera man but a lighting man complete with monstrous great "portable" television studio style lights.

I'm blaming the distraction of the BBC, filming with us for the day for a news item later that night, for the fact that neither of us had tracked the anaesthetic perhaps as closely as we might. It is often said, incorrectly in my opinion that, anaesthesia is 99% boredom, 1% terror but we weren't sure if we were approaching that 1%. Another difficulty with wild animals, even those in captivity, is that whilst there are recipes of drugs that can be used, by definition there aren't thousands of cases available to build a cast iron anaesthetic by and there are always individual differences in how patients react to drugs. This was demonstrated spectacularly on another occasion with The Bengal and the missing dart.

So there we were...6 people too many in a small cramped cage with a female lion, was she deep or was she light, the only call to make in this situation is to call a halt, Peter said he needed a few more minutes...no problem and everyone else..."time to leave". John and I made ourselves as useful as possible by standing outside the cage whilst all the BBC gear was dismantled and handed out to us as quietly as possible. Well don't want to go waking the patient too quickly by making too much noise eh?

Everyone safely outside and John administered the wake up and we retired right outside to wait

and wait

and wait

Just over an hour later the first signs of stirring came from the cage and the lioness with delightfully clean and repaired teeth took her first steps post anaesthetic and we retired to the bar for a well earned cup of coffee or was it something stronger, I can't quite remember.

The Lion, The Dentist and The Pulse Oximeter

“Would your device work on one of my patients?”, the gentleman sitting next to me asked.

The year 1987, the place a British Dental Association meeting somewhere in London. I had just addressed the British Dental Association advisory panel on Safety in Anaesthesia and Sedation headed by Professor Poswillo and had been extolling the virtues of a newly available piece of monitoring equipment which could, in real time non invasively, measure a patients pulse rate and oxygen saturation; The Pulse Oximeter.

Needing to know more before handing over nearly £2000 worth of monitoring equipment, I was told by the eminent and forward thinking dentist, Peter Kertesz, about a pending case involving a patient of his called Arthur.

A week later, the pulse oximeter and local rep Heather were duly dispatched. Luckily I was in the office when Heather rang me in a panic, she couldn’t get the monitor to work! Peter, I learned, was operating with a headlight on which was interfering with the monitors operation. We had originally thought we could use Arthur's tongue for the clip sensor as sadly, Arthur, being a lion, didn’t have the fingers and toes we were so used to, but the strong light stopped that. Hairy ears also precluded the successful operation of the monitor...what to do? Quickly thinking back to base principals of Pulse Oximetry...a well perfused capillary bed, with minimal pigmentation and accessible, Heather was instructed to put the “finger sensor” on Arthur's prepuce, to great effect!

Over the years, it has been my privilege to have been involved in a number of interesting cases with Peter, a particularly memorable one being, The Lioness, The Dentist and the BBC.

This is arguably the first time a pulse oximeter was used to monitor a Veterinary patient outside of the development laboratories, and I shall be eternally grateful to Peter for asking me that question. It took several more years before I was able to really introduce Veterinary Anaesthesia to the pulse oximeter and that took the help of another caring and very influential and inspirational lady: Polly put the Pulse Ox on.

Birmingham, Paris, Barcelona, London

Birmingham, Paris, Barcelona, London, that will be a list of shows (so far) that we are attending in 2013:
BSAVA,Paris Vet Show, ISFM Barcelona and the London Vet Show

New Year, New Blog, New Products, Bringing the Magic to the Consult

Happy New Year, we are working hard to make 2013 even better and brighter with some great new productcs like the new VM-2500 portable capnograph, making capnography even easier and a major new project, to Bring some Magic into the Consult

Congratulations to Samantha Parkhouse from Wear Referals for winning the Thamescope competition

Thank you to everyone who visited us at the recent BSAVA and a special thank you from Mike to everyone who asked about his recent 3 month adventure living and working in Malawi at The Billy Riordan Memorial Clinic www.billysmalawiproject.org/ and the Cheetah Conservation Fund www.cheetah.org/.

We will post a couple of pictures in a special gallery.

Congratulations to Samantha Parkhouse who won our Thamescope competition, your scope will be with you shortly Sam, it looks fabulous. To all you unlucky people (and there were over a 100 of you!) Mike will be writing to you shortly with a special time limited offer.