I had been warned that there were hazards of being a nursing student, but I didn’t really start experiencing them until this semester. It happens like this:
John: “Hi! I’m John.”
Kristen: “Hey, I’m Kristen. So what’s your major?”
J: “I’m in engineering. What’s your major?”
K: “I’m in nursing. What kind of engineering?”
J: “Oh, you’re in nursing? Hey, I have a pain right here. What is it? Should I go to the ER or just wait it out? Am I broken or should I just ice it?”
I have no idea, so usually it doesn’t do much good to ask.
Or like this:
Phone rings
K: “Hello”
Family member: “Hi Kristen! How are you? Say, what do you do for_____”
Both of these things happened to me in the last 24 hours. This first was with some guy at Navs who had a pain in his chest and wondered if his heart was stopping… I really am not the right one to ask about that. The second was my brother who had burned himself on his motorcycle. That I can deal with… :-)
Just for further reference, I’m not a doctor. I never will be a doctor, or have an advanced degree in nursing. My knowledge is pretty limited. Feel free to ask me, but I’ll probably just send you to the doctor’s office or ER.
Was enjoyable. I gave a full bed bath... And that's about all I can say about that because of HIPPA.
Oh well.
Really?? Well, apparently so. My professor for Fundamentals this morning was lecturing on oxygenation and told us this story:
“About 5 years ago, I was working in a doctor’s office and a woman came in complaining of really vague symptoms… dizziness, confusion etc. So we started asking questions and could not get down to the bottom of it. She came is again a few weeks later, with the same symptoms, only worse. We started running tests on her, looking for possible strokes, heart attack, airway blockages. Nothing came up. A few months later, she came in again, and by this time she was experiencing very stroke-like symptoms, with a very weak left side. We started running rarer and rarer tests on her, and nobody could figure out what was wrong.
On that visit, I was talking with the doctor, and I said,
‘Do you think there is any possibility that she could be being poisoned? Her husband never comes with her, and she’s mentioned something about arguments…’
So we ran more tests, for toxicity, and sure enough, she was being poisoned with cyanide. We notified the police and they pulled him over and even found cyanide in his truck. He spent some time in jail over it.”
