The road to rehab

There are a lot of roads people take to get to me at the Hotel.

Some people get old, fall down, and never get back up. Some go to the hospital for an operation and suffer a heart attack in the operating room.

Other people dive into swimming pools and hear a crack. Others are shot: in battle, in the course of a robbery (and they might be the perpetrator or victim), and some, are suicide attempts.

Many suicide attempts are fueled by PTSD, job loss, divorce and hopelessness.

Some folks make an attempt to free themselves from the weight of being a survivor. Being the only survivor of an ambush, a fire, a plane crash.

And finally, others, like Jeremy, are survivors of military sexual assault.

I hope you will share his story, so his dream can come true, and the perpetrators will be brought to justice once and for all.

Nuggets for August 26

So many goodies, so little time. Here are a few interesting things I've run across in my travels on the internet. Hope you enjoy!

The Bellingham Herald has an interesting piece called Why Medicaid should get out of the long term care business.

The Wall Street Journal online had an interesting article recently called Hospitals Own Up to Medical Errors.

The NY Times has had a few good stories recently you should read if you haven't already:

For Parents on NICU, the Trauma May Last
PTSD is not uncommon among the parents of preemies.

Saving the world's women
This article, from the NY Times magazine, details the plight of women in the developing world.

Guilt and Atonement on the Path to Adulthood
An interesting view on children, self-control and guilt

Is it psycho Thursday again?

That was my question this morning. Oh, why, oh, why do some people insist on being complete idiots?!

Psycho #1: The crazy patient who threatened everyone earlier in his stay was getting antsy when his pain meds were wearing off. So he asked for Tylenol. Which I didn't have an order for. Which required pulling (or finding) a doctor who was rounding willing to give me a verbal.

Got that, so all is good, right? Until...

Psycho #2: One of my coworkers made a mistake and started cleaning up one of my people. All this right after I had told him, "Go back to sleep and we'll get you cleaned up at 1030ish."

For some odd reason, the Slug decided she needed to yell at me and demand that I clean up another patient of mistaken employee. "No, I'm busy. (since I was still working on the order for Psycho #1 and I had my own other patient, in addition to med delivery). You're not the charge nurse. Go tell him/her if you have a problem." The Slug just kept getting in the way. Somehow, I managed to get everything done.

Psycho #3: The dreaded patient came in, and thankfully, left without issue. Said patient provokes PTSD in some of our nurses from the abuse on his/her last visit. Many people were really, really happy they didn't have to deal with that admission at this time.

To top it all off, we got the news that JC folks are on the prowl and should be visiting our hospital soon. If I wasn't having nightmares before, I'm sure they'll start now.

Less psychosis and more fun to come...stay tuned!

Rolling into the holiday...

And you guessed it, yours truly will be at Madison working when the sun goes down. It may rain in our neck of the woods, so we'll see if there are any fireworks. Thankfully, this year, there isn't anyone with really active PTSD that we have to worry about (sometimes fireworks trigger flashbacks).

For your browsing pleasure, I've found a couple of interesting articles. They're not about fireworks or the holiday, but are interesting nevertheless.

My personal favorite, since I've always wondered about this one: Q: What is the role of probiotics in the the treatment of acute Clostridium difficile-associated diarrhea? from the Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine. It's short, sweet and to the point.

FDA advisers vote to take Vicodin, Percocet off the market.
Will this really happen: Oh, this will be really interesting on our unit. (from www.cnn.com)

Finally, there was a character taking photos of our buildings and grounds recently, but I doubt we will make this list: 20 Most Beautiful Hospitals. I must say, however, that our location and neighborhood is very picturesque, even if our building's not so pretty.

Happy 4th of July to all wherever you are! More to come...stay tuned!

Nuggets for January 27

Oh, the weather outside is frightful, but it's great inside! Here are a few tidbits of information on the stuff that's happening in my world from the internet and the blogosphere. Enjoy your day whatever the weather!

I ran into this interesting article about PTSD and smoking cessation on Yahoo!News in the Health section.

We don't run into this too often, but Brown-Sequard syndrome is a spinal cord injury that appears every so often on our unit.

It's interesting to read radiology reports on patients, but sometimes, I just have to look all over to figure out what's going on. Here are a few interesting items I've come across lately.

Since I couldn't figure out the acronym, I just went searching and I found out what exactly
IPMN tumors are from this article.

Finally, I found this great Google book on CT scans while I was looking up the definition of punctate cysts at www.m-w.com which now has a medical definitions section you can choose when looking up a word used in medical terminology.