This is VERY troubling……
medicine
Plastic Surgeon Who Served In Vietnam Has Helped Provide Over 230 Surgeries For Veterans
There are truly great people in this world!!
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Marketing to Doctors (HBO)
Pharmaceutical companies have been out of control for decades now amassing gigantic profits and strong arming Doctors into prescribing medications in the name of making a profit as opposed to considering the health and well being of you, the consumers. John Oliver sums up how big Pharma has no interest in your health and they need to be stopped.
“Drug companies are a bit like high school boyfriends. They’re much more concerned with getting inside of you than being effective once they’re in there.”— John Oliver
Watch John Oliver Slam the Drug Companies on Last Week Tonight Return – TIME
“Walter White could have made a lot more money if he was cooking up rheumatoid-arthritis drugs”
Bachelor of the Week
So, I halfheartedly went on another date. It is sad when the thought staying home in your fuzzy PJ’s is more appealing than going out for a nice glass of wine or dinner. I agreed to meet this man at a nice local restaurant.
He was 15 minutes late….not a good sign being as it was a low traffic time of day. He sat down and we ordered drinks and the conversation was somewhat awkward which is odd for me because I can talk to virtually anyone. He spoke of his Ex-wife in a bad light and that never sits well with me. This was the Mom of his children he was talking about. Strike one.
Being a Nurse is a burden of its own. I can’t tell you how many times I have had to sit there and listen to every medical malady experienced by the other person. No, I do not know all the Doctors in Connecticut. No, I am not an expert is all areas of medicine. This man was no different. It turns out he was scheduled for back surgery on 3 discs in 2 weeks. He was in constant pain and took pain medications…along with beer apparently. I just kept thinking, why would someone date two weeks prior to major surgery? It turns out he was also smoking tons of marijuana which I believe has a place in medicine but, he was not doing it under a Doctor’s care. He also admitted to a pretty severe addiction to oxycontin….not something I want to deal with at this point in my life as, he was in complete denial. Strike two.
Then came time for the bill. Now, mind you, I was just there for one glass of wine. He insisted that I get something for dinner so I did. When the bill came he hemmed and hawed and fidgeted. I didn’t make a move to pay because he was the one who insisted I eat. He asked me to dinner as far as I was concerned. If I had asked him I would have paid. Strike three.
Nexxxxxxxxxxxxxxt!
Dying To Be Free
Excellent article about the inadequate and antiquated treatments for people suffering from the disease of addiction. Things need to change.
There’s A Treatment For Heroin Addiction That Actually Works.Why Aren’t We Using It?
http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/dying-to-be-free-heroin-treatment
The last image we have of Patrick Cagey is of his first moments as a free man. He has just walked out of a 30-day drug treatment center in Georgetown, Kentucky, dressed in gym clothes and carrying a Nike duffel bag…
He had been a dominant wrestler in high school… (Thinking about you, Cameron.)
(I’m also thinking about how sports and athletics can injure and maim kids before they even get the chance to become adults.)
In the months before Patrick’s death, Sydney Pangallo, 23, a recent Recovery Works alumna, suffered a fatal overdose. Dan Kerwin, 23, attended a Recovery Works program in the spring, and his sister found him dead of an overdose during the July 4th weekend. Tabatha Roland, 24, suffered a fatal overdose in April — one week after graduating…
View original post 1,252 more words
Addiction From the Perspective of a Nurse
In all the years I have been a Nurse, I have treated every age group from newborn to the elderly. I have treated people with just about any disease or injury you can think of. I have treated many people suffering from the disease of addiction. Those people came from every age group and socioeconomic standing. I learned early on that it is not a disease that discriminates. It is estimated that roughly 10% of the population is suffering from addiction. There is not one person alive who can say that addiction has not touched their lives in one way or another.
Early on in my career I was working in an Emergency Department. The triage Nurse was admitting a woman who was complaining of severe leg pain. The triage nurse decided based on nothing except that the woman was complaining of pain, that she was drug seeking. She came back onto the unit rolling her eyes and telling us of her encounter with the woman. I heard the woman yell out so, I went to assist her. I found her on the floor crying in pain. I put her in a wheelchair and took her back to a room and got her a Doctor. He was a compassionate man so he began examining her right away. I had other patients so, we met up to discuss her after his exam. It turns out she was suffering from Guillian Barre. Her pain was real and her diagnosis was very serious. I remember that triage nurse would not meet my eyes upon finding out that she was wrong about this patient. Trust me, she felt my eyes burning through her. I was enraged that she would judge someone and dismiss them as a drug seeker and completely miss their true diagnosis potentially causing them harm.
Fast forward to about a year ago. I have a patient who is a long-term heroin user. She was then 50 years old and introduced to heroin at 17 by her then boyfriend. I knew her for 8 years. Over the years, her health was ravaged by years of drug abuse. She was in constant pain but, her beautiful blue eyes would light up every time she saw me. She never spoke much to me of her history of drug abuse. She knew I accepted her and saw who she really was. She trusted me but, the shame she felt overwhelmed her. That she trusted me meant the world to me. I saw a gentle spirit. A loving daughter. With all that she had endured in the time I knew her, she always asked about my kids and had a smile for me. She often told me that she loved me. I got to know her parents and they took care of her with so much love. She was Daddy’s little girl.
One day she came in and was crying. Huge tears fell from her eyes. Those eyes pleading me to help her. In all the years I had known her I had never seen her cry so I knew something was very wrong. I asked her and she told me she was in excruciating pain in her right foot. She was seeing a Doctor about the pain but, suddenly it had gotten worse. This was a Friday, so I made a call to that Doctors office to ask that her pain medication dosage be increased. The response that I got floored me. The Nurse said no because of her history of substance abuse, judgment tainting her voice. Even after I explained that I knew her well and this was not drug seeking they refused. I called another Doctor who was caring for her and got the same response. I frantically tried to get someone to listen to me but, the answer was always the same. They assumed she was drug seeking. I then called her Mother and told her to bring her to the Emergency Room in hopes that they would take action and admit her for intractable pain. I was honest with her Mother about the roadblocks I had encountered in trying to get her help and apologized. She told me that she knew what people thought of her daughter, the heroin addict.
On Monday, when I came into work I looked into what had transpired in the Emergency Room and found out she was admitted to a surgical floor. She was scheduled for a right below the knee amputation that morning. The circulation in her leg was so bad that they had no choice than to amputate. Gangrene had set in. Her pain was real. I was furious that because she had a history of addiction her diagnosis was being missed. If I had not listened, and then fought so hard to get someone to listen she would had suffered enormously over the weekend. Her Mother called and thanked me. and we cried together.
When she came back to me after her amputation she thanked me. She then went on to complain that it pissed her off that if she were to have the desire to buy new shoes that she would have to pay for two shoes. I just looked at her and we both burst into a fit of laughter. That was my girl.
Six months after her amputation her health had worsened. I was very involved with helping her Mother make the decision to put her in hospice. The last thing she said to me before she died was, “Awww, Trish…I love you”.
There are so many misconceptions about addiction. The predominant misconception is that addiction is fun…that the person is making a choice to get high and doesn’t care about anyone or anything but themselves. There comes a point in drug abuse when all your choices are taken away from you. Addiction changes the chemistry of your brain. This has been scientifically proven. The addict is not using drugs because they don’t love you. They are using drugs because their body has become physiologically dependent on them and not using the drugs makes them feel sick. There is no fun in that. It is not a party anymore.
There is not an addict alive, who in a moment of clarity, enjoys the path their life has taken. They feel horrible. The emotional pain they feel is beyond anything that most people ever experience. Addict are despised by society. They are shunned. They fill our prisons because of the misguided idea that if they are punished they will stop. Treatment is difficult to find and most time insufficient. When someone would walk into the emergency room because they had made the decision to get help they would often be given a list of phone numbers and sent on their way. I’m pretty sure that rarely worked out well. If they had been taken in and placed in a treatment program immediately I have to believe the outcome would have been better.
Things have to change. We can’t keep doing what we are doing in the treatment of addiction because it is not working. The shaming and judging have to stop. If you were to encounter a diabetic with a double lower extremity amputation would you tell them that because they did not eat properly and take their medications that they got what they deserved and knock their wheelchair over? I doubt anyone would ever do that but, that is what you are doing every time you shame and judge an addict. You are knocking them over. You are kicking someone when they are down. Addiction is just as much a disease as diabetes is according to the World Health Organization and the American Medical Association.
I was having a conversation with some coworkers a few months ago. They were discussing an addict and even with their education, they were speaking of this person in a derogatory manner. I was the only voice in the room telling them that they needed to keep their erroneous beliefs to themselves because you never know who in that room was dealing with addiction somewhere in their lives. I became rather passionate in my argument but, got through to none of them. When I walked out of the room another co-worker stopped me. He told me he heard what I said and with tears in his eyes thanked me. He explained to me that his older brother had become addicted to heroin and had died of an overdose. He told me one thing people don’t understand is that an addict is a person. An addict is a Mother, Father, Sister, Brother, or child of someone. They are loved by someone.
I will not stop fighting for my addicts. I will not stop trying to educate people so lost in their ignorance. If this makes one person rethink how they view addiction, I have won. I will never stop trying to fight the battle for those who are not able to fight it themselves.
I am a Nurse.
HIV/AIDS From the Perspective of a Nurse
When I was 20 I became a Nurse. This was 1987. When I was in Nursing school, we weren’t even taught about HIV/AIDS…it was that new. These were the days before gloves were even used. I remember there being only one box on my Med/Surg unit and it was located in the dirty utility room. All care was given with bare hands. We got all forms of bodily fluid on our hands daily and just went over to the sink and washed it off.
As I worked, I began to see the hysteria on the news. It was a “gay man’s”, disease and thought of by most with contempt. There wasn’t HIV, only AIDS because the tests to detect the virus were not being widely used and were inaccurate at best. Generally, the first indication of the disease was at the point where it is was a death sentence. People died within a matter of day of being hospitalized.
As the medical community became more educated, standards of care were beginning to be implemented. The first of those standards was to wear gloves during any patient care involving bodily fluids. At that time the method of transmission was still not fully understood. A tear drop was to be feared. I distinctly remember the day I walked into work and there was a box of gloves outside of each and every patient room. As I would walk into a patients room, gloves on, I distinctly remember many times being admonished by the patient….they were insulted to think that I thought they had that “gay mans”, disease.
People who were diagnosed were ostracized, held in contempt and abandoned by family and friends. They died alone in a hospital bed with even the health care workers afraid to touch them. If an AIDS patient were on our unit the nurse assigned would give up that patient at any cost. They would trade two medically complex patient to one AIDS patient. I saw those patients laying in bed silently, alone and without the care that other patients would receive. I was so young and inexperienced but, knew I could not let someone die that way so, I began taking on those patients and caring for them as lovingly as I would any other patient.
Looking into the eyes of these patients will haunt me for the rest of my life. This was the only time in my entire career that I could not comfort a patient. AIDS was not just a disease, it was thought of as a final determination of a person’s lack of morals. It was a punishment for what was judged as deviant behavior. To most of society, it was a person getting exactly what they deserved. To think of that now horrifies me. I can’t imagine dying that way.
As science eventually made strides in identifying modes of transmission, the public was lagging behind in accepting the science. The fear that had gripped our society held on tight. One of the modes of transmission that was identified was sharing needles and that group, people suffering from addiction, was just another group who were getting just what they deserved. Addiction was not even close to being considered by the medical community as a disease. Now society had another group of people to judge.
Change came slowly but, it did come. Research began to work at a frenzied pace much to my surprise. The stigma was so strong that I never imagine that what happened next would have happened. Suddenly, there was a call to find a cure. A call so strong that it literally drowned out the voices of those shouting from their moral high ground that these people were getting what they deserved. From my perspective, that call came from the gay community that had rallied to help their own like nothing I had ever seen in my life. They became unstoppable. They demanded research, education and development of treatments. They raised funds to finance research. They rose from the ashes and stood proud. Against all odds, they made things change.
Now, HIV/AIDS is not a death sentence. It is a chronic disease just like diabetes or hypertension. The stigma is still there for some but, the world with never completely rid itself of ignorance. I celebrate that someone can live a long, healthy life with this disease but, still mourn those who were not as fortunate. Those that died so completely alone in the beginning.
To me, watching this health crisis unfold and evolve is proof that change can come from within our hearts. That is where this change came from. The heart of the gay community. The compassion and strength they showed the world has gone unnoticed to some but, it remains in my heart as a symbol of the power of the human spirit and the power of love.
10 Years a Single Mom 