Phx Adventures of a civilian nurse in the Justice System...*graphic medical descriptions enclosed*

*giggles* oh, i love these stories!

 

Hey, you guys remember me? I keep on disappearing.

Anyway, this kinda stuff fascinates me, Jedi_Wench! I'm planning on going into the medical field after high school. You have inspired me, lol.

 

Cool KenobisGirl! We can always use more recruits!

For once a Saturday wasn't emergency night this week. YIPPEE! But we did have some funny stuff happen. I got another "hypoglycemic" person who threatened to sue me if I didn't give her a snack after I explained to her that her blood sugar was perfectly normal. Then after a half hour or so she realized that being beligerant, swearing at me, and calling me some pretty atrocious names wouldn't make me feed her so she wrote the following apology note:

Nurse,

I am sorry I used faul language at you. I am very hungery, will you feed me please, I'm hungery.

The funny thing with all these so called hypoglycemic people who come into the jail is that they think that they can choose not to eat all day before they are arrested and then demand food at their beckon call after they are arrested as if their choice not to eat is my fault and should be remedied immediately.

My question is, if they know they are "hypoglycemic" and they need to eat frequently...WHY THE HELL AREN'T THEY EATING? We're not talking homeless hypoglycemics here either. This girl had nicer clothes,shoes, and makeup than me and was trying to convince me that she was homeless. My rear end girly-girl.

My favorite inmate from last night:

We currently have an inmate who is throwing some of the highest blood pressures I've ever seen. We've been medicating him with some pretty good doses of anti-hypertensives and have only managed to bring his pressures down a bit. For instance, some of his blood pressures have been 210/112! That kind of blood pressure puts him at serious risk of stroke. We've been monitoring him closely and yesterday he started complaining of chest pain. One of the main ways to distinguish between chest wall pain caused by anxiety and actually cardiac pain is to palpate the persons chest wall over the site of pain. A person with anxiety will flinch and a person with cardiac pain will not because the pain in a cardiac situation is internal and the pain associated with anxiety is superficial.

This man was having the anxiety sort so the nurse on shift called the nurse practioner for an order for an anti-anxiety med in addition to a one time dose of a anti-hypertensive that we had standing orders for. The NP asks the nurse on staff what dose she thinks is appropriate for this gentleman. He is African-American, quite tall, and heavily muscled, so the nurse thinks that maybe instead of 0.5 mg or 1 mg that she should give him 2 mg. Now we're talking 2 mg of clonazepam/Klonopin here. (Just as a side note, I've never given anyone with anxiety more than 0.5 mg to start, especially if I don't know if they've ever taken it before.)

So I come on shift an hour or so later and immediately there is a frantic call from the man's cell block for a nurse. We get there and the inmates are nearly rioting because they think this guy is dead. We go in there and he's sitting in a chair all limp and drooling. The dude was SNOWED, totally snowed. He's probably the first inmate that went to jail to get blasted! After reassuring all the inmates that he'll be fine we somehow manage, with the help of MANY officers to get him on a stretcher, down to medical, and into an observation cell to sleep it off. Obviously this man is not a drug abuser because he certainly had no tolerance built up for the drug, which is funny in its own right because the guy was arrested for moving drugs across state lines!

When he finally did sleep it off and I went to go talk to him he was all grins and kept saying how nice we were and how much he loved this jail and that it was the nicest jail he'd ever been in.

The other nurses and I laughed all day about that one.

The coolest thing of all...his blood pressure was down to 121/80, for probably the first time in years. Now he has a regular order for 0.5 mg of the stuff in the am and pm in addition to his regular blood pressure meds to control his pressures. I held his eve

 

OMG!! The guy was drugged by the nurse!? Yeah, I'm sure he was feeling fiiiiiiiine by the time he woke up.

 

lol!

 

I could use a dose like that at work.

 

Spend a day in my jail IA and it just might happen!

 

That is a tempting offer.

 

I don't mean to hijack your thread, Wenchy but I thought you might find this interesting: British doctors revive maggot treatment.

Courtesy of Delta Source.

 

Delta Source is always welcome in any thread of mine! I think maggot and leach therapies are awesome! They really work too. I've watched a few Discovery Health Channel programs about it, not to mention learning about it in school. Maggots are incredible debriders because they clean out wounds without eating viable tissue...they only eat the necrotic stuff and like your article says, have anti-bacterial properties. Not only are they cost effective and cheap, they don't compound the anti-biotic resistance problem and once patients become used to the idea of having maggots on their wounds, they even report that the treatment actually feels good. The maggots are placed in the wound sterile and left for a prescribed amount of time. An air-permeable bandage is placed over the wound so that no has to look at the squirmies. They are useful in a variety of necrotic wounds from ulcers to gangrene to highly infectious wounds.

If you like the idea of maggot therapy, you would also be interested in leach therapy. Leaches rock for amputations in maintaing and restoring circulation. Leach therapy is often a life-saver for a severed finger or limb and I have a friend who severed a few fingers and with the help of leaches, kept all of them after they were surgically reattached.

I actually heard an interesting fact about leach therapy on the radio today. In the US 35,000 leaches are sold for medical use every year and there are actual leach farmers who ensure high quality, sterile leaches.

 

*gets mental picture of maggots in a wound*
*shudders*
COOOOOOOL.

 

I'm curious about how one goes about sterilizing a leach or maggot, you can't exactly toss them in the autoclave after all...

 

im thinking of a little leach sized bath tub. and maggot bubble bath. make them happy little ... gross sqirming parasitic things.

 

I should not have read this just before eating dinner. No. I shouldn't have.

**runs screaming from thread**

 

well, as long as your not eating rice or sauteed mushrooms or drinking red wine, you should be fine.




mostly.

 

mmm, beef rice tonight for dinner. Try studying parasites in laboratory then walking across the street for the spaghetti at the cafeteria then see how susceptible you are to these sorts of stomach problems

 

pasta wouldn't do that to me. thinking of hte little buggers is enough. parasites are so gross.

 

It would if you'd just been slicing into dead round worms in the lab
btw, be absolutely certain you don't have any of the eggs under your fingernails before you eat.
Then of course there was the repeated thing one quarter of going to lunch with my hands smelling of a strange combination of shark and formaldehyde. Suddenly that nice club sandwich you've lifted up to your mouth isn't quite so appetizing.

 

eating after bio lab was gross for that reason. the parasite dissection was nasty though.to think of them living in someone is just so gross.


and sharks stink bad when you cut them up.

 

Well, on my clinical last night it was nutcase night. We had everything from demons tugging on a womans "naughty spot" to the devil himself.I now can say i have started an IV on satan.Plus a whole lot of drunk and abodominal pain.

 

My mom's an RN, so I can eat while reading this and it's no biggie. In fact, having pizza right now.
I do forget that not all benifit from the mealtime stories I have and find I get in trouble with meal mates by talking about mundane stuff like an appendix being infested with pin worms or going wacky and growning hair and teeth.
meh.

-D-

 

we almost made our CR puke at the last meeting. something about starting a sentence with the phrase, "this kid was using a circular saw"... really got to her.


she would have puke all over my burger though. so im glad she didnt yack.

 

Umm, gross creepy, crawly thingies crawling around with access to get inside my body? Ummm, don't think so. I am not very squeeeemish, but that would make me totally yack, wicked style. Meh.

 

You guys are great! Someone asked how you sterilize the maggots and leaches. My dad did exercise research on sterilized rats for years and I think the process involves the animals/insects being treated with heavy doses of antibiotics before birth and then being raised in a sterile environment. They do this for many generations before they can be sure the animals/insects are completely sterile and then they can sell them. That's what I seem to recall being told about sterilizing lab animals and medical insects...but I could be wrong. Something to that effect though. Does anyone else know?

Last night was suicide night at the jail:

We had the paranoid schizophrenic who was convinced we were poisoning the water and won't drink anything but juice...which is made with the water of course, but he doesn't seem to realize that.

Then there was the schizophrenic who doesn't really have a reason for suicide except that he seems to really like the rubber room and the big green suicide suit. Now this is strange because the entire room is rubber, there is a hole in the floor covered by a steel gate for a toilet, and absolutely nothing else in the room. The "turtle suit" as we call it is a padded green suit that never seems to fit anyone and the inmate is not allowed to wear any underclothing while wearing it. This guy happily wears the turtle suit and sits in his rubber room and smiles when I bring him meds. Go figure.

The third charming inmate is not only suicidal but homicidal and radioactive. I'm not kidding, he's radioactive. He has prostate cancer which he calls "prostrate cancer" and has had a radioactive seed placed to kill the tumor. No one can be around him for more than 30 minutes at a time and even then should not be within six feet of him. He refuses to take his meds for epilepsy and it may well kill him if we can't title 36 him soon.

The fourth caracter of the night is also a vicitm of schizophrenia and refuses to eat period. He looks like a walking skeleton already and his case truly is sad. He was once a highly intelligent young man on his way to becoming a biochemist at a notable university when he had is first schizophrenic break. Very sad.

Schizophrenia is perhaps one of the worst illnesses I've encounters so far. Not like an infection that can go away with time and meds, not even like alzheimer's which robs a person of their memories...this disease robs you of your sense of security, your common sense, your happiness, your family and friends and it does it all before you reach 25. You can live a lifetime, 70+ years as a schizophrenic if you don't manage to kill yourself first. Alzheimer's while terrible, usually lasts less than twenty years and while horrible at it's conclusion, at least you still have a life for 50-60 years before it begins. With schizophrenia, you just become a young adult and your life is stripped away in a series of breaks from reality. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

 

yuup. paranoid is the worst kind.


and wenchy, with you being pregnant, you are staying far away from the radioactive guy right?