Classification of Recovery Room Ventilation

Had the classification of recovery room ventilation been established before this period began, patients and support persons would have had a shared vocabulary for a condition that currently resists description. The vocabulary does not exist. This document is an attempt to create it.

CLASSIFICATION ONE: FUNCTIONAL

Functional ventilation moves air without producing awareness of air movement. The occupant of a functionally ventilated space breathes without thinking about breathing. This is the correct baseline. It is not a comfort. It is a precondition. Adequate ventilation is not a recovery condition. It is a baseline.

CLASSIFICATION TWO: INSUFFICIENT

Insufficient ventilation produces a quality of air that becomes noticeable after approximately forty minutes. The noticeability is not acute. It does not present as urgency. It presents as a gradual narrowing of attention toward the immediate physical environment, which reduces the occupant's capacity to direct attention toward recovery, conversation, or the overhead television, which is tuned to a channel no one selected and cannot be changed from the current position.

CLASSIFICATION THREE: INSTITUTIONAL

Institutional ventilation produces a temperature and humidity profile consistent with a building designed to serve many different functions and optimized for none of them. The recovery room is cold. The hallway outside the recovery room is warm. The transition between the two environments occurs at the doorway and is not gradual.

COUNTERFACTUAL PATHWAYS

Had the recovery room been ventilated to the standard of CLASSIFICATION ONE, the support person would not have spent forty minutes formulating a request to adjust the temperature and then declining to submit the request on the grounds that the request would require leaving the room and that leaving the room was not an option worth the ventilation improvement it might produce.

Had the support person submitted the request, this document would not need to document the decision not to submit it.

The temperature was not adjusted. The classification system was developed instead. This office acknowledges that the classification system does not improve ventilation. It records the experience of insufficient ventilation with enough specificity that a future occupant might recognize it and feel that recognition is a form of company, which is not the same as warmth but is sometimes what is available.