my week, in brief

Right before I rest my head on my pillow to sleep, or perhaps collapse complete from brain overload, dozens of facts float through my head, maybe even thousands. There is some relevant information, like the positive purposes of good fiber, and the connection of adequate potassium to build a strong functioning heart. And other bits of information that might not prove so handy for my own personal life, for instance an infant’s posterior fontanel closes at 2 months while the anterior by 18 months, a toddler loves to say no and thus should have finger foods so he can feed himself and think its all completely his idea, contractions in labor should be about 2 to 3 minutes long and with a duration longer than 60 seconds but if there are any late decelerations you need to cut that IV Pitocin stat, and a psych patient has a right to make phone calls, vote by absentee ballot, and send letters out, even if they are to the President suggesting he check his backyard for aliens…the green kind that is. Then we get very numerical. 500 mcg of Rhogam should be administered to a unsensitized mother at 20 weeks gestation, serum sodium levels normally range 136-145 mEq/L, the therapeutic level of Digoxin needs to be .2 to 9 mg/ml. Then the random names come in, for instance, low chloride levels signifies Addison’s disease and SIADH, while high levels is significant of Cushing’s disease. Nerves II, III IV and V are named Optic, Oulometer, Trochlear, and Abducent respectively and are nerves that direct eyes. Sydenham’s Chorea is also called the St. Vitus dance, and since I was just in Prague at St. Vitus Cathedral I desperately needed to find out the connection. It turns out that the folks during the middle ages, in addition to the Black Plague, were also coming down with a variety of nerve spasms that resulted in their upper and lower extremities from moving all over the place as if it were a dance. So the folks, just like dancing the Tarentella, created a European Dance Mania as a cure to the nervous spasms. Folks would dance for hours, sort of like our modern day raves, and eventually St. Vitus was said to be linked to cures while praying over these dance manics.
Hmm, to digress a little as I walked around the park with my dad this afternoon, I suddenly found myself describing all the safety techniques used if a person goes into a seizure. I also went in to a general description of the growth and development stages of Erikson as I watched kids play in the park I found myself sending my cousin a text message telling him I found the initials PVD in my nursing book. Not the DJ, paul van dyk, however it stood for peripheral vascular disease.

So, these are some of the things listed above that were on my mind lately :)