Although we are needed for so many things, we usually end up in a broom closet-sized office somewhere at the end of a hallway located at the furthest point from our patients. We are tasked to do things no one else wants to do, not because it's our job, but because we're respiratory and nothing bothers us.

We drink too much caffeine, we talk too much, we complain until things get done, and we have a good time. Usually we are forgotten. We don't get invited to cake and punch, we aren't "in the loop" on what's happening, and no one wants to sit with us at lunch. Still, let the hospital operate without us. We've carved our niche.

Last week was Respiratory Care Week. I hope each of you had a chance to celebrate, to take a little break from the hustle and bustle of your normal lives and enjoy the fruits of your labor. I hope your hospital did something nice for you and that those you work with stopped to tell you how much you are appreciated.

I hope your state society sent you a nice letter or email so that you know they are watching out for you. I hope the AARC lets the government know how important you are to health care and gets some things done in Washington, D.C., for which we have been waiting a long time.

 On a more personal level, I hope your supervisor thanked you for all you do and nursing supervisors extended you some extra special professional courtesy for the many services you provide. I hope your emergency staff baked you a cake or brought you coffee for all those times you were called in the middle of your rounds or at 3 o'clock in the morning.

I hope your administrators sought you out to tell you they couldn't run the hospital without you. I hope doctors bought you breakfast, lunch and dinner for filtering through all their orders, trying to make sense out of them in their absence, or for being there with their vent patient when they cannot.

Respiratory therapists are a rare breed. Nothing bothers us. Nothing is too difficult for us and nothing is beneath us. We've systematically made ourselves important. We've been tested by fire and come out the other side. I hope you had a great Respiratory Care Week and could enjoy it and take pride in what you do. No one else can or would do it if you weren't there. For that, you can be extremely proud.

The kids were attentive, despite a small class size and several boxes of pizza that were waiting for them once I left. While they were licking their chops, I explained to them the types of patients we see on a daily basis. We all see the same COPDers over and over. Asthmatics. People with bronchitis and cancer.

The sad fact is that approximately 3,000 kids between the ages of 4 and 18 smoked their first cigarette yesterday. Half of them will still be smoking 10 years from now. Whatever the reason they decided to take that first deadly puff, the fact is that at least one of the kids I spoke to has no intention of quitting.

I know who she is. I could see it in her eyes, just like you see it when you remind your patients how bad smoking is for you. One of the others will try to quit but will fail. With any luck, eight out of the 10 in attendance will be able to give it up for good.

We need to reach out to these kids. Don't blame them, harass them or ridicule them because they smoke. Offer to help them. If you're a current or former smoker like me, relay your experiences with them. Let them know it's OK to still have cravings. Let them know what to expect. Use yourself as a model of what smoking will do to them, how it will affect their lives, and the risks involved.

The government is not going to outlaw cigarettes. Despite being the only thing in the world that kills you when used exactly as directed, the government doesn't care. The only way cigarettes will get off the market is for people to stop using them. Honestly, I don't see that happening soon.

I don't lecture youngsters about smoking. They are smarter than I am. They either already know the facts or think they do. Instead, offer alternatives to them. Get them to focus on something other than the cigarette. Sure, tell them about the bad breath, the yellow teeth, the wrinkles and the risks of lung disease.

But realize that you are talking to people, albeit young ones, and treat them as such. Captivate them with not only your knowledge, but also your care too. Make sure you make yourself available to them if they want to quit. Don't fail them when they need you. The future generation is depending on us to help them. This is just one of our many chances to do that.

That's just my opinion.

Good drivers know how to use their mirrors. They use them to back up.They check them frequently for other cars and pedestrians in their blind spots and the look at them often to see what's going on around them.

Respiratory therapy should do the same thing.

We have come a long way. Some changes over the years are great. Some are not. While we now work with a fairly competitive pay scale, we lack basic respect from other departments in the hospital.

Our failure to secure our niche has allowed physical and occupational therapists to overtake us. Nurses are happy to build their schedules around these two areas. But when was the last time a nurse held up an IV or an aide held up a bath so you could give your breathing treatment?

Reimbursement for our profession is horrible. We've had two bills, S343 and HR1077, stuck in the finance committee on Capitol Hill for a long time.

Respiratory therapists are like fire extinguishers. We're pretty much forgotten until inspection time or an emergency. We don't have catchy commercials on TV. There are no respiratory people featured in any magazine I know of outside of our own trade magazines.

I've never heard a respiratory therapist talking on the radio, even though we deal with some of the most plentiful and deadly diseases in the world. It's always been this way.

That's in the mirror reflecting the past. Look there once in a while.

Then look out your front windshield and see what you can change. Get on a radio station. Ask local news to feature your department. With Respiratory Care Week coming, now is a great time to focus on the road ahead, never forgetting the road you are leaving behind you.

That's just my opinion,

 Last weekend, I was in Denver attending the COPD Educator Course sponsored by the AARC and the COPD Foundation of Colorado. The conference was excellent! If you've never been to one, you should go the next time it's offered.

The speakers were great. The host hotel, the Doubletree in Denver, was a beautiful building with comfortable rooms and friendly staff.

The conference started on Thursday afternoon. After registration, a crowd of about 200 was welcomed and the speakers introduced. The hall was full of respiratory therapists, nurses, a few doctors and even some patients who would speak to us about their lives on oxygen.

After receiving a copy of my materials, I sat down and listened to speakers who were both entertaining and knowledgeable about their chosen subjects. After each lecture, there was a brief question and answer period, and these provided even more insight into how things are being done around the country.

It was a great opportunity to meet other practitioners from many different states and several different work environments around the country.

Friday morning featured a wonderful continental breakfast followed by speakers until lunch time. For lunch, we all got to sit down with colleagues from around the nation, compare notes, network a little and enjoy a wonderful meal.

Back in the lecture hall, classes went on through the afternoon until about 4:30 p.m. At that time, the speakers took questions from the audience. I thought this was really cool. There you have some of the most knowledgeable and experienced experts in the country in front of you, just waiting for your question or comment. What more could you ask for?

If there were drawbacks, they were largely unnoticed. Annoyingly, cell phones went off during the lectures. The cell phone thing was just bad manners. When attending a conference, turn the thing off! Few things are as distracting to someone as trying to listen to an expert lecture on a subject while also trying to figure out what song someone is using for a ring tone. This is just rude.

It's rude to the speaker who has taken the time to come give their perspective, rude to the people sitting around the person being called and rude to the organizers of the conference, who have spent a lot of time and effort in putting together quality programs such as this one.

Turn the thing off! At the very minimum, put it on vibrate. Do something so that the phone is not a distraction to others, please.

In a related area, it was reported there is a lack of involvement by many respiratory departments in the AARC/Homeland Security ventilator survey.

The AARC now has heard from roughly 63 percent of the departments nationally about their ventilator status. This is a poor showing, in my opinion, for how seriously we are taking the potential swine flu pandemic we may have to deal with this winter. If you haven't already done so, please get your survey completed and sent in.

It takes only a few minutes but provides a wealth of information.

In my opinion, the COPD Educator Course is a winner! Great speakers, nice atmosphere, friendly folks at the registration desk and in the conference itself, very approachable "experts" who were willing to share facts and figures as well as personal experiences while allowing others to share theirs also. The conference was long enough to cover a lot of ground, but not so long it droned on with no end in sight like some conferences. I think everyone who attended would agree that this one was a keeper!

That's just my opinion.

Every once in a while, we all need some change. Individuals do, departments do and hospitals do. Everything changes. We get older, time passes more quickly and the things we used to love eventually go away, giving way to something new and more modern.

How we make the change is much more important than the change itself.

A lot of hospitals at which I have worked do it exactly backwards. The changes come from the top and trickle down, rather than having active participation from employees at the start. The board of directors or maybe even the CEO decides a change is needed.

Rather than poll employees about how to approach the change, they just "order it" and expect it to be done. Even within a department, changes often come from the supervisor or a higher up, while suggestions from the working folks go ignored.

This is how foolish, untalented people manage departments and hospitals. They do it, not to be mean or arrogant, I believe, but because they don't know how to manage.

To me, change is good; but how the change is made is more important than who suggested it or what it is. Enlist your people. Get their ideas.

You may be surprised to find out how much they know, what they think about and how inventive they can be in helping you do your job. You'll gain their trust, make them feel worth something. In return, they will bend over backwards to ensure you are a success.

That's just my opinion.

Well, fall is finally here, even though Missouri hasn't had much of a summer this year. I believe we had only one day over 100 degrees, and it's been wetter than I remember it used to be.

The fall colors promise to come out early this year and are expected to put on a good show.

Wherever you are, please take some time to take a break. My kids would say that I need a "chill pill." It's important to take a bit of a break this year because we didn't have our typical "summer slow down." Plan now to take a nice, long drive through your part of the country. We all need breaks.

Now, with the threat of H1N1 on the horizon and the usual busy winters respiratory therapists go through, it's really vital to hit the road before winter snowfalls hit. Now is the time to take a trip to see the leaves change.

Now is also a perfect time to watch the afternoon thunderstorms come in over the mountains or feel the chill in the air while you support your favorite football team on a cool, crisp autumn evening.

In my opinion, it's time for a break. Even if we can't take valuable time off from work, we can still make the most of our time away from the worksite. Ride your motorcycle for one last trip. Attend an event. Take a walk down a path through the woods.

Short breaks help us focus on what's important and re-energize us for the coming months.

You've earned the R&R. You need it. Now go out and enjoy it.

That's just my opinion.

The best thing about living here in Lexington, Missouri is the people. They work hard, they play hard, and they are genuinely good people. Living just a little outside of Kansas City, it would be easy to try to make ourselves a suburb, but people out here don't care much for the "burb" life. We are a rural community with a couple of highways going different directions. Part of our lives is deciding which highway is the most attractive to us, but those same highways often bring us back home later in life.

RT is kind of like that. We may branch off into sleep, EEG, or some other "sub-field", but eventually the good ones all come back home. In doing so, we build a career field of highly trained and qualified people with experiences from outside of our field that can make us all better, just like the child who leaves Lexington for college and comes back to share his or her knowledge with the rest of us. We all benefit. We gain respect from outside of RT, as well as respect for each other. Showing that respect happens when we "talk up" each other, when we talk highly of respiratory therapy or other staff members.

In my opinion, respect is one thing that is easy to give but isn't given too often. Make an effort to show some respect today. Talk up a co-worker. Talk good about one of your doctors or nurses. Listen, don't talk, during a conversation. You may find if you show respect to others, they will make an effort to show some respect back.

That's just my opinion.

Isn't technology great? When it works the way it's supposed to, it can be awesome! Unfortunately, it seems like I am always the guy in line at the store when the computer breaks down and the cashier must actually use her brain to make change. That simple coin transaction can take a while in some cases.

Still, a few things I have been doing lately have reminded me just how far we have come in our technology and how great the results can be.

Conference calls have been around forever, but I just finished a series of them that were really cool. As we talked on the phone, we also reviewed slides on which we made corrections. I have used group meetings that allowed several students to "chat" with each other at once in an electronic "room" reserved for that particular conversation. In general, these "meetings" go extremely smoothly and are kind of fun to do.

On another front, many CEUs are available now for those who are technologically advanced. The AARC is hosting a webcast Sept. 22, and many other organizations are starting to utilize this tool as a means to replace expensive travel costs.

In my opinion, we should get on board with this technology because all hospitals are short on funds. To curb our costs, we should be using online meetings to get in touch with each other, improve our education, get our CEUs and just seek guidance from other professionals in the field.

Blogging is great, and I truly look forward to communicating with all of you in this forum. But there is nothing like the instant feedback you get from a conference call meeting or chat group. Set one up for yourself. Involve your friends or colleagues. You may be surprised at how effective you can become!

 That's just my opinion.

On Aug. 24, a jury ordered Phillip Morris USA to pay $13.8 million to Jodie Bullock, daughter of a deceased smoker who passed away from lung cancer which her family and their attorneys state came from smoking Benson & Hedges and Marlboros, both Phillip Morris products.

Reading this makes me think of how dumb people are. Without trampling on the deceased, let's state that she knew, at the tender age of 17 when she started smoking, what she was choosing to do was harmful to her health.

As she continued through her 64th year of life, she had undoubtedly heard many times that smoking was bad for you. At what point do we assign blame to cigarette companies and take all the blame away from people who make and keep dumb decisions?

In my opinion, I think we should do what we can to get rid of the tobacco companies altogether. They are drug pushers who prey on vulnerable people looking for a bad habit. They hope to get you hooked and then bilk money from you for the rest of your life, regardless of how long or short a time period that may be.

However, the bigger problem is the people making the dumb decisions. In the old days, you can say no one knew. That's probably true. No one knew cigarettes would kill you, and the cigarette companies sure weren't going to tell you.

Nonetheless, if you've had access to a television, radio, newspaper, or any other media in the past 30 years and you smoke, you are making a dumb decision. Plain and simple. You know the risks. You have to understand cigarette products are going to kill you. I find it hard to believe that you could have managed to escape all the ads, public service announcements, and printed materials that tell you you're going to die.

While I feel sorry for the family of the late Ms. Bullock, the problem isn't Phillip Morris USA. The problem is the Ms. Bullocks who refuse to take responsibility for the decisions they make to smoke and then whine (or sue) once the expected, advertised, well-known, and well-documented outcome occurs.

Let's fix the problem, not put a band-aid on the symptoms.

Jim Thacker, CRT, AE-C, RCP 

It's an exciting time for me. The "Walkin' for Wheezers" project I launched in May netted $1,580. People gave much more than expected, and I enjoyed some "celebrity status" for being the nut job doing the walking. As I have spoken to groups across the county since, the one thing I can count on is that someone will mention the 90-mile walk that apparently accomplished the mission of boosting asthma awareness. Even other counties that surround our little hospital are calling and asking me if I could visit them and do some asthma education. 

What's even more exciting is getting to hand out the spacers. I will deliver 249 spacers to asthmatic kids in Lafayette County schools by mid-September.

Respiratory therapists are some of the most warm, giving, passionate people I have ever met. Whether it's your own twist on celebrating the upcoming Respiratory Care Week (Oct. 25-31), next year's World Asthma Day (May 6, 2010), or joining someone else and supporting their project, find something.

It never hurts to do something you wouldn't normally do. It's opened a lot of doors for me. I get to talk to people I may not have ever spoken with about asthma. Everyone wants to meet the kook who walked. I say, whatever works! Visit the websites of GINA and AARC and see what's going on. Use those amazing minds to come up with your own ideas. If all else fails, I'll be doing something unique and crazy soon! Join me.

--Jim Thacker, CRT, AE-C 

We have talked before about how this profession can get respect. First and foremost, I think we have to get involved. Our lack of involvement speaks volumes to other disciplines that seem to be more concerned about our patients than we are. I'm not suggesting that everyone become a member, although that would be nice, or even become asthma educators, but we do need to be involved.

In my opinion, if you want to boost your own credibility and respiratory care's morale and validity, do something. Whether it's writing a politician, attending conferences, or preparing your big thesis on everything respiratory, just do it. If you've already wasted your summer, fall is coming. It's still not too late.

All my best,
Jim Thacker, CRT, AE-C, RCP

We have been subjected to discrimination from day one. Schools never had desks that worked for left-handed people, and notebooks weren't made for us either. Now some genius, probably a lefty, figured out that if you put the notebook binding on top of the page rather than on the side, everyone can use it. And now luckily desks are made more ergonomically designed to fit everyone, not just the right-handed people.

I will admit to knowing some people, even lefties, who were probably not in their minds at all, right or wrong. I will also admit to knowing some quite brilliant right-handed people. I think every occupation has those folks. Still, as hard as it is for us lefties in our right minds to tolerate the rest of you, we generally like you and will probably let you stay around. We need you to do your thing so we look good doing ours.

In my opinion, left-handed people should have special parking, carry a separate ID badge, and get tax breaks. I think that's fair. We're clearly less than half the population yet we must solve more than half of our problems because of our right-mindness. At any rate, if you're a lefty, my hat's off to you! If you're not, find a left-handed friend. It'll make you look that much smarter.

Jim Thacker, CRT, AE-C, RCP

Sure, we all know education is important, but who has the time or money? You do. Online campus learning is a way to maximize your time and efforts, and grow new talents you know you have but haven't been able to utilize yet. Look into online college for yourself. It's fun, requires the discipline that comes naturally to an RT, and could lead to that next promotion or even a new job altogether.

In my opinion, if you want to do something that is exciting, fun, and meaningful, look into going back to school. It's hard work and often not convenient, but it's an ego boost and a great way to better yourself, for both you and your patients.

My best,
Jim Thacker, CRT, AE-C

The way this works is simple. Congress will pass one bill a year dealing with health care. S343 and HR1077 will not stand on their own because of this rule, so it's being attached to the health care reform bill.

The AARC is simply asking this: Write your politicians and tell them you'd like them to support these measures. If you have patients and physicians who may be so inclined, invite them to write their politicians, too. The goal is that all 435 congressional districts support us on this. You can look on the AARC website and use the "Capital Connections" to find your politicians, or write me to find them for you.

Even though it's not the exact bill I would like, I support these measures and the AARC. It's a start, and if we never get started, then we'll never be the profession we all wish for. Do your part today. Get in touch with the AARC. It would even be a good time to join if you're not already a member. Support them on this one. If you have no luck there, let me know and I'll try to help you with information.

My best to all,
Jim Thacker, CRT, AE-C

Everyone realizes that cold weather is bad for people with lung diseases, but the warm weather should not be ignored. Warm weather invites air that is too stuffy to breathe, dehydration, and more work for those who need supplemental oxygen to get around.

In my opinion, it's up to us to spread the word. Remind your patients. Remind your friends. Remind your patients' friends. Tell everyone you know and everyone you see that warm weather can easily land you in a hospital bed. The dangers from the sun, the hot winds, and the temperature are seen every day in the emergency department.

Remind them to drink plenty of fluids, consume carbohydrates, and shade themselves when possible. Stay indoors, if that's an option, when the temperature tops 85 degrees. Mow and get fuel for the car before 8 a.m. or after 7 p.m. when the sun's rays are not directly on you.

Take care of yourselves and your patients. While sun tans are cool, overdoing it can lead to sunburn or worse. Be careful, have a great summer, and teach your patients what they need to know about warm weather hazards.

Jim Thacker, CRT, AE-C, RCP