Becoming a Respiratory Therapist: The Challenges and Rewards that Await You
Many people want to break into the health care field because they know that there are jobs available in health care virtually anywhere across the country and that the health care field can provide a stable career even in trying economic times. However, what you may not know is that you can enjoy an attractive salary in a position such as a respiratory therapist and you needn’t necessarily be a doctor or a nurse to help others. The respiratory therapist is a highly-specialized career that will expose you to patients with breathing and other lung or cardiopulmonary (heart and lung) disorders.
While many of your patients as a respiratory therapist will be elderly, as organs tend to begin to slow their functions as people age, your array of patients will include everyone from young infants whose lungs and cardiopulmonary systems are developing to older patients with breathing disorders such as asthma, emphysema, and lungs affected by cancer. As a respiratory therapist, you’ll also possibly be on-site during emergency treatments in order to jumpstart the breathing and blood-pumping of victims of stroke, heart attack, shock, and drowning.
If you don’t want to work in emergency as a respiratory therapist, your work will be more clinical in nature. You’ll speak one-on-one with patients and get their view of the history of their breathing difficulties. You’ll use specialized equipment as a respiratory therapist to measure the patient’s lung capacity and you may analyze laboratory samples in order to determine levels of carbon dioxide, oxygen and PH in the blood.
Your primary focus as a respiratory therapist will be to get the patient’s cardiopulmonary or lung disorder to a manageable level. This may occur with the use of medication, exercise, and/or breathing therapy. As a respiratory therapist, you may also help install a tube for the use of ventilators into a patient’s trachea or windpipe and then you will instruct the patient on the use of oxygen tanks. Your long-term continued treatment of the patient as a respiratory therapist will involve the continued monitoring of the patient’s breathing so that you will know when to increase or decrease the oxygen delivered into the patient’s system.
The respiratory therapist job is fairly flexible, as you can work in emergency if you crave that level of intensity, or you can have regular work hours if you need a schedule to fit work into your busy life. As a respiratory therapist, you’ll be rewarded with an attractive salary and a challenging job in which you help other people.