Liquid Oxygen Is Needed

Hors-Sens

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Getting the Oxygen we need?

What I mean by the needed oxygen: When I am in the house with 3 LPM at rest or doing minor tasks like cooking or washing the dishes my sp0₂ will be from 90% to 95%. I will still be short of breath at times. If I am getting 2 LPM instead my sp0₂ will be from 84% to 92%. I will be short of breath often and my heart rate will be in the high 80s and topping 100 at times. At 3 LPM I am getting the oxygen I need. At 2 LPM my body is struggling.

When shopping in the grocery store at 6 LPM my sp0₂ will be from 87% to 96%. More often short of breath, but blood oxygen levels and heart rate are good. At 4 LPM LPM my sp0₂ will be from 80% to 90%.

When playing pickleball at 10 LPM I am short of breath, my sp0₂ may drop to the low eighties occasionally but will quickly rise to the mid nineties. Heart rate will be from 110 to the low 130s. If my heart rate goes into the high 130s or low 140s I take a short break. If the rates don’t drop quickly I will take a longer break. At 6 LPM I might be on the pickleball court, but I am not playing pickle ball.

Liquid Oxygen Is Needed

In the mid 90s to 2006 Congress put pressure on Medicare to cut oxygen costs. In 2006 Medicare initiated a payment program that favored concentrators over liquid oxygen and oxygen tanks. Medical oxygen tanks are widely used while finding a business to fill a liquid oxygen reservoir is hard. I have had no trouble finding medical liquid oxygen but few are willing to fill my reservoir. Liquid oxygen should at least be available to those willing to pay for it. Without liquid oxygen I am unable to get the oxygen I need!

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An Official American Thoracic Society Clinical Practice Guideline, “A conditional recommendation for ambulatory liquid-oxygen use in patients who are mobile outside the home and require >3 L/min of continuous-flow oxygen during exertion.” From https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33185464/

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Shortly after getting a prescription for supplemental oxygen I was given a walk test to see if I qualified for a handicap parking permit. In that test it took 3 LPM at a slow walk to keep my sp0₂ in the mid-80s. At that time I was still working 36+ hours per week and struggled to keep my blood oxygen levels in the 80s, even when using my Inogen One G3. If I had been given a prescription for 6 to 8 LPM of liquid oxygen I could have continued working with blood oxygen levels in the high 80s to mid-90s. Instead of needing to go on SSI I could have continued to work.

If I had been prescribed liquid oxygen 5 years earlier when my blood oxygen levels started dropping into the 80s while at work in a grocery store I would have remained a productive citizen and been paying taxes instead of going on SSI. It makes far more sense to prescribe oxygen when it is needed to remain active and not wait until it is needed to stay alive and are unable to work.

We not only need liquid oxygen, but also need to change the guidelines on when supplemental oxygen is prescribed!

Contact hors.sens1@gmail.com
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