Read The Chart
When I was going through the Army LPN program at Ft. Sam Houston, pharm part of our course requirements was doing clinical rotations on the various floors and sections of the hospital. Most of the job was becoming familiar with doing complete patient assessments, buy charting, medic and basic procedures; ie: dressing changes, moving the patients, etc. One of my classmates whom I was paired with one day, learned a very valuable lesson.
My partner that day (who I will refer to as PFC Mybad) was taking care of a young man on a medical/surgical ward. That means all the serious problems he had were treated and he was now recovering. The morning routine was pretty simple: go in, greet the patient, do a physical assessment, change the linens if necessary, and ask if there’s anything they need prior to morning medication rounds. Unfortunately, Mybad forgot one key element at the beginning of this encounter. She failed to read the man’s chart to get a history of his current condition.
The physical assessment is essentially a rundown of check on the body’s major systems; musculoskeletal, cardiac, pulmonary, integumentary, etc. She did all of these very cheerfully and professionally, the whole time chatting up the man and his wife who was at the bedside. Then things went wrong. When checking muscle strength, a routine test is to hold your hands out, palms up, and ask the patient to press down on your hands with his as hard as he can. When she asked him to do this, he just kind of stared at her, bewildered.
That’s when the wife softly said, ”He’s a quadriplegic, dear.”
PFC Mybad turned beet red while the patient, his wife, and I went into near hysterics laughing.
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May 28th, 2008 at 11:29 am
I’d think if she was really paying attention to the patient she would have (or should have) noticed he couldn’t move.
That is just funny as hell I couldn’t help but laugh rather hard.
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Snyarhedir reply on February 15th, 2011 11:11 pm:
I would laugh more if I did not just feel overwhelmingly sorry for the patient (for being quadriplegic).
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February 15th, 2011 at 11:08 pm
Quadriplegia sucks. Any kind of paralysis sucks. The condition was not permanent, was it? (Stupid question, I know.) I just hope that he got some umbilical stem cell treatment eventually. That condition just fucks a person up.
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Airman Gast reply on September 6th, 2011 1:27 pm:
Being a quadriplegic (not having quadriplegia) means that his four (hence quad) limbs have been amputated. It isn’t a paralysis and can’t be cured with stem cells. He couldn’t move because he had no legs or arms to help him move. With physical therapy his core strength will increase and he will gain body movement but will be confined to a wheel chair.
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Janice reply on November 29th, 2014 6:15 pm:
Airman Gast,
According to every internet medical dictionary I found, as well as every other website I could find, quadriplegia is defined as “paralysis of all four limbs”, not the amputation or lack of all four limbs.
http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/quadriplegia
(I looked it up because I used to have a work colleague with a degenerative nerve disease, and although he still had all 4 limbs, I thought I recalled people referring to his condition as near quadriplegia.)
I am not sure why the definition you are familiar with for quadriplegia is different.
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August 11th, 2015 at 5:38 pm
This is a tricky topic, but I have to say, a sane psreon facing a life- ending illness or an illness that leaves them completely trapped in a body that does not work, I think has the right to his or her own exit. To not allow a psreon to meet death on that individual’s terms to me is immoral. I would guess that it would make things easier if we all wrote down our wishes for these circumstances and then amend them if our views change. To me there was nothing sadder than watching the spectacle of Terry Schiavo a few years back. The people who should have respected her wishes the most, held onto her not to prolong her life but to prevent themselves from facing her death. Funny, that they claimed to be so religious and so believing in a life much better than the one on earth.
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April 1st, 2016 at 2:39 am
Frankly I think that’s absolutely good stuff.
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