Severe respiratory problem emergency bizarre treatment

A patient was being transported by us at my work service from Mcleod in Florence to his home in Sumter for his final days. He was on 25 liters oxygen by the newer oxygen output on portable tanks mixer. We got to his house, him even at 25 liters having trouble pulling in it when he got some upset at what was happening to him. His hospital bed was just being finished and for us to wait a few minutes to take him in, I think we were on our 4 or 5th tank by then. Oxygen delivery was there taking a lot of large tanks inside while he was there. I had my partner go inside to see if he could get the time till we could take the patient in. He came back, and told me that the large tanks had only 15 liter out maximum fixed to them. The delivery man said a manager at his company in Turbeville might have another one that’s 25 liter one at their station. He left to see if he could go get it if he could contact that fellow. Our patient was getting so hurt that I figured he was going to go down, and make us take him to the ER in that town. I was trying to come up with something to deal with this, since the family did not want the patient to leave the house with us. We were going to have to when we were going to go out of oxygen and have to start bagging him. I came up with this idea. We took a large suction cylinder with the large hole and the other two sealable holes on top. We put the tubing going to him in the large middle hole inside the head, and taped it around the inside of the cylinder. The small tank oxygen supply was cut down to 10 liters per minute. One oxygen supply only line was hooked to the portable tanks meter. Another oxygen supply only line was hooked to the large tank on the wall output at 15, since it was full. We taped the entire cylinder to keep it to not pop in two from pressure. This let us cut down on the use from the small tanks almost by half for a little while, even though the large oxygen tank was now going down also. This was a solution while we were still in the ambulance parked at the house. We were thinking about moving him inside to the large tanks inside, which would help the time frame with us still having to use some of our small ones for this in there. But then we found that the delivery man had taken the 15 liter one back with him, to get the 25 liter one if he could. With the time getting this high, we started to get low on the total oxygen available on the unit. We asked to family if they had heard the fellow was on the way back yet, and they said he had not called yet. I told them we were going to have to transport the patient to the ER, because in 15-20 minutes we would be dry of oxygen. They did not like it, and the patient was getting very worried, but we had no other choice. We left there and called the ER on the phone. Getting him out of the ambulance, we got him off the large and portable combination, and we went down to the 25 liter output one on the head of the stretcher. As we were moving him over on to the stretcher in the ER, the needle on the tank we very using was going down. They changed him over to the wall unit. They could tell he was going to be a bad patient, because they pulled his record of when he had been there in the past. We were finishing up the patient ambulance record when the family arrived. They said the man called and would be back at the house in about an hour from where he was at with the high output meter. They told him to bring it on, and maybe the ER would let him come back.

If we had more oxygen tanks, hooked to our invented oxygen lines connected with a suction cylinder, we would have been able to stay possibly till he go back with the high output meter. But we had 8 small cylinders, plus one under the stretcher head for moving, and the large one onboard. On a van style ambulance. We thought we had enough extra's, but the on scene part did not get enough information from who ever called to make arrangements, which if why we had to invent this. If the time frame on a lot of things is off, you have to come up with strange things to keep reality working.