title: Novel use of an exchange catheter to facilitate intubation with an Aintree catheter in a tall patient with a predicted difficult airway: a case report.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The Aintree intubating catheter (Cook® Medical Inc., Bloomington, IN, USA) has been shown to successfully facilitate difficult intubations when other methods have failed. The Aintree intubating catheter (Cook® Medical Inc., Bloomington, IN, USA) has a fixed length of 56 cm, and it has been suggested in the literature that it may be too short for safe use in patients who are tall.
  
  
  METHODS
  We present the case of a 32-year-old, 180 cm tall Caucasian woman with a predicted difficult airway who presented to our facility for an emergency cesarean section. After several failed intubation attempts via direct laryngoscopy, an airway was established with a laryngeal mask airway. After delivery of a healthy baby, our patient's condition necessitated tracheal intubation. A fiber-optic bronchoscope loaded with an Aintree intubating catheter (Cook® Medical Inc., Bloomington, IN, USA) was passed through the laryngeal mask airway into the trachea until just above the carina, but was too short to safely allow for the passage of an endotracheal tube.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  We present a novel technique in which the Aintree intubating catheter (Cook® Medical Inc., Bloomington, IN, USA) was replaced with a longer (100 cm) exchange catheter, over which an endotracheal tube was passed successfully into the trachea.
authors.affiliation: Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care, Soroka Medical Center and Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel. zlotnika@bgu.ac.il.
authors.forename: Shaun E
authors.initials: SE
authors.lastname: Gruenbaum
authors.forename: Benjamin F
authors.initials: BF
authors.lastname: Gruenbaum
authors.forename: Sergey
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Tsaregorodtsev
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Dubilet
authors.forename: Israel
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Melamed
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Zlotnik