Man, what a long week. I just took a 3 (or maybe 4…) hour post-class nap because I’ve been sleeping an average of 4 hours a night all week. I’ve got a take-home test to muddle through this weekend, but omfg, I’m totally planning to sleep extensively.
Monday we had a lecture about pain management. The professor’s main point was that you ALWAYS believe the patient’s reports of pain, and never treat it as “drug-seeking behavior” or “psych issues”. In the afternoon, we had a visit from 4 ovarian cancer survivors. Again, the moral of the talk was, “listen to your patient!” A pretty important consideration for future caregivers, I think.
Tuesday there was a whole debacle over possible cheating. On a 3 point quiz. In a 1 unit class. Seriously? Who would bother? The professor was FURIOUS. A flurry of emails ensued, and in the end the quiz was dropped from everyone’s grade, so now the final grade is out of 97 instead of 100. Good work, cheaters, for raising my grade a little bit. In a 1 unit class.
Wednesday was awesome because I GOT TO SEE WIRES GET PUT INTO SOMEONE’S HEART!! I’m so into watching surgery and procedures that I’m extremely unlikely to see in my future practice, so I was STOKED to see this. The guy had a thing in his chest that was similar to a pacemaker but was actually a little tiny defibrillator. Dude’s heart rate frequently dropped to around 35 beats per minute (normal is 60-100bpm…see? learning!), so this little box was installed in his chest to give him a jumpstart whenever his rate went below 45bpm. When they took the box out, they attached the wire sticking out of his heart to tiny little jumper cables. Seriously, a little tiny red one and a little tiny black one, just like you’d use to jumpstart a car. The surgeon inserted two additional pacemaker wires, carefully threading them through blood vessels into the right atrium and left ventricle of the guy’s heart. So cool. He used an X-ray machine to see where the wires were going. We also got to see a sonogram of another guy’s heart. It was so crazy to see the little valves we’d learned about, just flapping away!
Thursday I had some…interesting patients. One woman insisted on lying perfectly flat all the time, and also wanted the blanket to be tucked in around the edges of her body. Every time I went into her room, when I’d go to leave, she’d yell, “TUCK ME IN!” Another patient wouldn’t let anybody even get near him, and the care team was blaming dementia caused by renal failure. There was a middle aged Brazilian man who flirted with everyone who came in the room. When I took his vital signs in the morning, he asked, “Can I have my lollipop now?” Another patient was on contact isolation for C. difficile, so he was very chatty whenever I came to see him. He said he felt like a prisoner.
And today I wrote about in my last entry. Doing interpretive dances of EKGs was really the best way to possibly end the week.
