I'm an engineer, artist, mom, wife, and registered nurse. I work on an inpatient psych unit and live in the Pacific NW USA with my husband and our menagerie of dog, parrots, cats, and a couple of corn snakes.
Archive for August, 2008
Apple Leaf Poultice
The elderly black woman’s blood pressure had been dangerously elevated. While I was checking her vitals for one of many times that shift, she looked up at me hesitantly. “If I tell you something, will you do it for me?” she asked. “What is it?” I replied. “Go out yonder,” she said, pointing at the [...]
Posted: August 22nd, 2008 under Nursing, Parallel Universes.
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A Growing Problem
An ambulance technician in Scotland, in his post Fat Chance, has finally (and beautifully) put into words some of the frustration I’ve felt so many times when working with obese patients:
Morbid obesity is dangerous, hence the moniker, but in the emergency situation it’s not the ischaemic heart disease that causes the problems, nor the diabetes, [...]
Posted: August 6th, 2008 under Nursing.
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Insight
There are cameras in the patient rooms on our psych units. The images they produce are tiny, black and white, and grainy. (That’s not really by design; they’re just very old, and they aren’t broken, so there’s no reason to replace them.) They don’t show much detail — just enough to allow us to keep [...]
Posted: August 5th, 2008 under Nursing, Parallel Universes.
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HIPAA, HIPAA, Hooray for Bureaucracy!
We were getting a new patient on the psych unit. This person had been picked up by the police with no ID, psychotic and mute. We were informed we couldn’t admit them as J___ Doe, which was the name the police had given them, because that would reveal their gender, thereby violating their privacy. The [...]
Posted: August 2nd, 2008 under Nursing.
Comments: 2