Never a dull moment

It may be a holiday week, but it's been busy! The Hotel is always hopping around the holidays because people want to go home. If they can't get home, we have to take care of what we can before lots of other people take off for the long weekend.

While some of our folks would like to go home, they get sick. One character mentioned that he/she had a transient loss of vision. He/she was worked up, then he had another incidence. Between the opthomologist who said the patient had a fugax and the neurologist who wanted a stat carotid exam, he/she ended up with a quick trip to Washington for an overnight to get all the diagnostics done and issues resolved.

In rehab, it's very rare to have a patient on TPN. In fact, I've yet to see one in any of our units (acute or otherwise) because if you're on TPN, you're usually sick and not a rehab candidate NOTE: this may vary in other settings.

However, if you end up with a chyle, a not uncommon sequela of the infamous triple A, you could need TPN for a while, as one of our recent patients did. Thankfully, no more TPN and patient is working up on the diet list, slowly but surely.

One of my favorite things to do is to read imaging reports. We have lots of rehab patients with CTs, Xrays and many, many MRIs. I follow along in the reports and learned this week about Thornwald cysts which popped up in a patient's report.

Finally, since it's turning to winter here in the northern hemisphere, I also learned about thunderstorm asthma, which was sending people to emergency rooms all over the southern hemisphere recently. Just makes me wonder how many of these sent me to the emergency room as a new asthmatic. My poor mother!

Thanks for following and reading along! May you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving  (or rest of the week) wherever you are!

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.