My forth patient clinical day was pretty low key.  My patient was fairly easy.  No foley, no PCA, no IV fluids.  I didn’t know this when I picked him. He had a foley, a PCA and IV crytalloids running when I chose him.  He had an interesting case and one that I thought would have had a colostomy but as it turns out it did not.   Turned out to be a bowel anastamosis with loss of about 10 cm bowel.

My main job was getting him to walk and keeping track of intake (not so much output)

I was able to witness a Pap smear on another patient.  It was an interesting perspective to be on the other side of the speculum instead of the business end.  I wasn’t looking into the patients vagina but I was watching the nursing assistance of the resident.  Something one day I will probably have to do.

Post conference was pretty low key too.  I talked really quick on Lactated Ringers (sometimes refered to as Ringers Lactate or Ringers Acetate) about how it was an isotonic crystaloid (solutions that include Saline and Dextrose -Crystalloids are aqueous solutions of mineral salts or other water-soluble molecules ) solution with various electrolytes in it.   Lactated Ringers contains 28 mmol/L lactate, 4 mmol/L K⁺ and 1.5 mmol/L Ca²⁺

Lisa, talked about breast surgery.  I think she had a patient with a preemptive double mastectomy and that’s why she talked about it.  I wish I rememberd more of that talk.

We also talked about Potassium and other electrolyte replacement protocols.  One of next weeks expectations is initiate electroyte replacement if indicated by the patient daily labs. So we’ll see how that goes.

We got our first care plans back.  My paper was an orange mess despite saying that is was a good care plan.  From what I can see it was not specific enough to my patient.  So I will have to try harder to make it more specific to my patient  from this week.  We’ll see how that goes.  My pathophysiology paper was also not specific enough.  I’m going to have to go over all the notes from the last three papers to make this next one better.

I didn’t work that hard in clinical but I was still tired when I got home.  Probably because I knew I still had a discussion board post to do for our cardiovascular module.