How to use the Incentive Spirometer

Sarah Minton: I'm going to show Emily how to use the Incentive Spirometer correctly. So with the incentive spirometer, it's an inspiratory effort. Okay? So we're trying to open up those long fields. So you inhale with it. Okay? There's two parts to this when you're looking at the instrument itself. There's this part here, which you can see two indicators on.

This little guy, when you inhale is going to go up. If you do it too hard and too fast, it's not as effective. And so what you want to do is a nice, smooth inhale, and keep this guy right in between these indicators. So it's a nice, slow, and then this you'll notice will start to rise. And the more you can get this to go up, the more you're having those airways nice and open. You'll go exhale, put your mouth on it, and then slow and easy. Yep. And keep those right in the middle. And see this guy going up? That's beautiful. That's perfect. And then when you're done, let this... Don't cheat. You let this drop all the way back down before you do another one.

Emily Cobian: Okay.

Sarah Minton: Very good. Perfect. And you'll do 10 times an hour while awake. Okay? You do 10 of those an hour, so three on commercial breaks.

Emily Cobian: Okay.

Sarah Minton: And what that does is a couple of things. It helps to open up the lung fields. All right? Which helps decrease your risk for pneumonia. It also kind of, it can make you cough sometimes when you do it. Okay? But what that does is it helps to mobilize the junk that's kind of in your lungs and your upper airways from being intubated and just all the things that happened with cardiothoracic surgery. And so what that does, it allows you to mobilize them, cough them, get them up and out, and you spit them out in a Kleenex, and you throw it in the garbage. Okay?

Emily Cobian: Okay.

Sarah Minton: So it helps to decrease your risk for pneumonia, it helps to mobilize the secretions, and it helps to reinflate those longs. So then, you can get off oxygen and you'll breathe better and you won't get so short of breath when you're walking around.

Emily Cobian: Okay.

Sarah Minton: Okay?

Emily Cobian: Can I do it more than 10 times?

Sarah Minton: You can, but I wouldn't want to do it too, too much. Okay?

Emily Cobian: Okay.

Sarah Minton: Because you don't want to exhaust yourself and exasperate yourself. But I would say 10 to 15 times an hour would be fine.

Emily Cobian: What is this arrow for?

Sarah Minton: Oh, I'm glad you mentioned that. Okay. So this is your goal indicator. When you first come out of surgery, a lot of times we kind of set the bar low. You have chest tubes in, it hurts, it's hard to take deep breaths. But we want to give you kind of goal points that you can set at. So the goal indicator just... Say, the first day post-op, we'll probably put it at 500. And we set the bar low. It gives you something to work toward. But once those tubes are out, we might move it up to maybe up here because you'll be able to take deep breaths. You won't have those sharp pains from the chest tubes. So we kind of moved this up a little bit so that you can goal yourself and kind of see where you're at from before. And then as you improve, you can move it up.