Management of the Difficult and Failed Airway, 2e >J. Adam Law

55.1 Case Presentation

"A 69-year-old man has been in the post-anesthetic recovery unit (PACU) for 6 hours with a slowly expanding neck hematoma following an uneventful left carotid endarterectomy under general anesthesia. Over the last 45 minutes he has become symptomatically short of breath. Neurosurgery has booked him to return to the operating room (OR) for wound exploration and evacuation of hematoma. Preoperatively, he was otherwise healthy, taking no medications, and was noted to have normal-looking airway anatomy. Post-induction at the original surgery, he was documented to have been easy to ventilate using a bag-mask, presented a Cormack/Lehane (C/L)¹ Grade 1 view at direct laryngoscopy using a Macintosh #3 blade, and the trachea was easily intubated with an 8.5-mm internal diameter (ID) endotracheal tube (ETT)...."