See it
Watch on my 4ort.mov channel: the six breaths — the short film renders from the same composition I worked the shift cadence into.
What the film walks you through
Not shallow, not rushed. One full respiratory cycle as the unit of measure. The number is oxygen and CO₂ at once.
Is the chest rising evenly? Is the work visible from across the room? Symmetry tells you where to look first.
The patient who can't finish a sentence, who's bracing on the cot, who's pulling with the neck — that's the sign I don't miss.
Within the minute I have a trajectory. Slow is still a read: it tells me how this body is coping, not just failing.
Why I made it
Most people know the machines before they know the nurse. But on the floor, my first instrument has always been the breath I can see and hear — before I ever reach for the pulse oximeter or the monitor. I filmed it so the cadence stops being abstract: it's a habit any one of us can learn, and it's the hand-off I carry between my own shifts.
It stands alongside the fuller clinical protocols I keep here, and the community-health assessment lens I bring out of the ED into Detroit's neighborhoods.