Let's be blunt...

Okay, sometimes as a rehab nurse, you have to do it.Using grandiose medical terms like micturition and defecation just don't cut it.

We have to ask "Did you pee lately? " (due to a variety of reasons) and "Did you have a bowel movement?"  Yes, nursing students, if you can't observe it, you have to get reports from your patients, and like those videos, you have to ask questions: color, consistency, etc.

We sometimes even resort to the old standby, especially for the really deaf hard-of-hearing folks, "SO-AND-SO (insert name here) DID YOU POOP LATELY?" This is always especially fun when the soundproofing is not so good in the exam room.

So, needless to say, since I have some of those old characters (many of whom don't hear well) as patients, I really enjoyed reading the headline below (which wouldn't surprise me if I heard it out of our folks..)

Michael Douglas: Oral sex caused my throat cancer (from the UK Guardian)

While Michael still needs some patient education, he may have already inferred something from the literature from the comments he made.

I just wonder how Catherine Zeta-Jones took it all when she picked up the paper.

More later...

Happening in threes, fours?

First,  in September, Michael Douglas reveals he has a head/neck cancer.

Next, Head Nurse jo tells us about her own cancer diagnosis.

Then, she tells us about another blogger who also has a rule out oral cancer test coming up.

And lo and behold, today, a story on Yahoo! says Tony Gwynn has a salivary gland cancer.

Folks, please pay attention. What can you do? Don't miss your next dentist appointment and screening. If something feels funny, check it out with your favorite health care provider.

Topics of note

Here are a few items I've encountered in my day-to-day practice and some related articles.

Oral care
How many of you out there really know if your patients brush their teeth? For a lot of SCI patients, if the nurses don't do it, patients don't get their teeth brushed. Reuters Health ran an interesting article in the past week about the relationship between oral hygiene and pneumonia. It's not just associated with ventilators anymore, folks.

Devices and other goodies
On our unit, we have lots of people with Baclofen pumps. Baclofen pumps are wonderful things that can get a patient who's in what looks like a permanent fetal position back to the straight and narrow, so he or she can ride in their wheelchair and do lots of other normal things we take for granted.

One of our patients who came in this week has an interesting variant: he has a baclofen/morphine pump that delivers both drugs intrathecally.

Bugs!
A recent patient came in and screened positive for a UTI. The culprit: E coli, which according to Todar's Online Textbook of Bacteriology is responsible for 90% of UTIs. This same patient has a history of odd bugs, including Kocuria Kristinae.